A deeply impressionistic, compelling novel about a young girl’s life in the waning days of the British Empire.
A photo album in prose about the brutality of life in British South Africa.
Loshe’s debut novel offers glimpses into the unrelentingly sad and violent life of Shirley Schreiber in the British South African territories in the mid-20th century (now Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa). Shirley and her siblings are raised by her mother and a brutish drunk of a father who drags them from Durban to Port Elizabeth to the Transvaal and points north in search of work and, later, safety. Businesses are festooned with signs reading “Nee blanks nee” (Afrikaans for “Nonwhites No”), and the sound of tribal drumming fills the air. As the narrator, Shirley remembers and vividly recounts the almost incomprehensible cruelty of the men around her: her father bloodies her brother and mother, a close relative rapes Shirley herself, and revolutionaries behead a gentle servant and burn a woman to death in her car. The man she marries when she comes of age attempts to murder her twice, then threatens to kill their children. Halfway through the story, just as readers assume things can’t get any worse, they’re warned that “the terrifying ordeals that we had survived had only been the beginning.” This is not merely a collection of horror stories, however: Shirley loves the wilderness, enjoys sweet moments with her mother and sister, and feels joy. But because so much of what happens is narrated from a young girl’s point of view, these scenes carry a strange, varying weight: through a small child’s eyes, bouts of sickness and “Soft, yellow, baby chickens” assume the same narrative importance as rapes and beheadings. As a result, this is a novel of subjective reportage, not objective analysis. Still, though readers may not know why or even when events are happening, they’re always presented with vivid pictures of what is happening. Readers won’t be able to stop reading in order to learn more about this bad, vanished world.
A deeply impressionistic, compelling novel about a young girl’s life in the waning days of the British Empire.Pub Date: March 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-0365-6
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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