This is a unique contribution to LBGTQ literature and the first book by an Equatorial Guinean woman to be translated into...
A young woman chooses to be her true self rather than conform in Equatorial Guinea.
Okomo is an orphan. Her mother died during childbirth, and no one will tell the teenager who her father is. She lives with her maternal grandparents, both of whom are eager for her to get married. The only member of her family who truly loves her for herself is her uncle Marcelo. Both Okomo and Marcelo feel repressed by village life and the strict requirements of Fang culture. Marcelo is expected to impregnate a woman of their tribe cursed with an infertile husband. Okomo is expected to enrich her family by finding a wealthy husband. But Marcelo is attracted to men, and Okomo loves a girl named Dina. The Fang call Marcelo a “man-woman,” and he is finally exiled to the forest for his sexuality. As for Okomo, there is no Fang word for her. “It’s like you don’t exist,” Marcelo tells her. The setting sets this apart from most gay fiction published in the United States. Okomo is growing up in the 2000s, but her sexual coming-of-age echoes similar stories from much earlier American eras. Okomo isn’t just an oppressed minority; she is something that most of the people around her have never imagined. She doesn’t even understand herself until she meets others like her. Obono’s storytelling style is straightforward and her language is unadorned. This gives her slender novel the feel of a folktale, but an inverted one. While folktales most often reinforce social norms, this novel subverts them. The forest here is not a place of danger; it is a place of refuge for those who have no place in their community. The heroine’s true family is, ultimately, her family of choice, and she doesn’t embrace her true nature by claiming her birthright or fulfilling her prescribed role but rather by accepting herself fully: as a bastarda—the child of an unmarried woman—and as a lesbian.
This is a unique contribution to LBGTQ literature and the first book by an Equatorial Guinean woman to be translated into English.Pub Date: April 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-936932-23-8
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
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
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