An unholy mess, but a ride well worth taking. And do look for the Kornwolf sooner or later at your nearby multiplex.
Multiple incarnations of the title beast terrorize rural “Pennsyltucky” in this raucous third, and last novel from the late (1971–2005) Midwestern author.
As he did in its predecessors Lord of the Barnyard (1999) and Skirt and the Fiddle (2002), Egolf—who’s sort of a mutant amalgam of Jack Kerouac and Harry Crews—lampoons the heartland and its comfy values. But there’s something authentically weird about the Middle Americans of the hamlet of Blue Ball in Pennsylvania’s Stepford County—as native son and newspaper reporter Owen Brynmor learns when he returns “home” to investigate reports that “The Blue Ball Devil was back.” Indeed, a particularly grungy were-person has been devouring livestock, wrecking farmland and provoking policemen. And, as Owen’s further research suggests, it’s either the “Kornwolf” of European legend (“still reviled as a spirit of vengeance, a curse of the fields”) or the progeny of 16th-century German landowner and reputed incestuous cannibal Peter Stubbe. Or both. The resulting mayhem revolves around the local Amish community, led by tyrannical Minister Benedictus Bontrager, whose physically and emotionally abused son Ephraim is suspected of strange nocturnal misdeeds (“cow tipping” and much, much worse); a gang of louts known as the Crossbills; boxing coach Jack Stumpf, whose own demons are related to his Vietnam experience; and several ostensibly good country people with generations’ worth of skeletons in their blood-stained closets. The book is heady, over-the-top fun for much of its considerable length, but its effect is diffused by a seemingly endless Walpurgisnächt finale that unimaginatively apes the kill-‘em-all conventions of the teen slasher flick. Egolf had talent to burn, but stringent editing should have whittled this burly haywire tale down to fighting weight.
An unholy mess, but a ride well worth taking. And do look for the Kornwolf sooner or later at your nearby multiplex.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-8021-7016-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of...
Orange’s debut novel offers a kaleidoscopic look at Native American life in Oakland, California, through the experiences and perspectives of 12 characters.
An aspiring documentary filmmaker, a young man who has taught himself traditional dance by watching YouTube, another lost in the bulk of his enormous body—these are just a few of the point-of-view characters in this astonishingly wide-ranging book, which culminates with an event called the Big Oakland Powwow. Orange, who grew up in the East Bay and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, knows the territory, but this is no work of social anthropology; rather, it is a deep dive into the fractured diaspora of a community that remains, in many ways, invisible to many outside of it. “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together,” he writes. “Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.” The plot of the book is almost impossible to encapsulate, but that’s part of its power. At the same time, the narrative moves forward with propulsive force. The stakes are high: For Jacquie Red Feather, on her way to meet her three grandsons for the first time, there is nothing as conditional as sobriety: “She was sober again,” Orange tells us, “and ten days is the same as a year when you want to drink all the time.” For Daniel Gonzales, creating plastic guns on a 3-D printer, the only lifeline is his dead brother, Manny, to whom he writes at a ghostly Gmail account. In its portrayal of so-called “Urban Indians,” the novel recalls David Treuer’s The Hiawatha, but the range, the vision, is all its own. What Orange is saying is that, like all people, Native Americans don’t share a single identity; theirs is a multifaceted landscape, made more so by the sins, the weight, of history. That some of these sins belong to the characters alone should go without saying, a point Orange makes explicit in the novel’s stunning, brutal denouement. “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them,” James Baldwin wrote in a line Orange borrows as an epigraph to one of the book’s sections; this is the inescapable fate of every individual here.
In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of America itself.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52037-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.
A Christian woman and a Jewish man fall in love in medieval France.
In 1088, a Christian girl of Norman descent falls in love with the son of a rabbi. They run away together, to disastrous effect: Her father sends knights after them, and though they flee to a small southern village where they spend a few happy years, their budding family is soon decimated by a violent wave of First Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem. The girl, whose name becomes Hamoutal when she converts to Judaism, winds up roaming the world. Hertmans’ (War and Turpentine, 2016, etc.) latest novel is based on a true story: The Cairo Genizah, a trove of medieval manuscripts preserved in an Egyptian synagogue, contained an account of Hamoutal’s plight. Hamoutal makes up about half of Hertmans’ novel; the other half is consumed by Hertmans’ own interest in her story. Whenever he can, he follows her journey: from Rouen, where she grew up, to Monieux, where she and David Todros—her Jewish husband—made a brief life for themselves, and all the way to Cairo, and back. “Knowing her life story and its tragic end,” Hertmans writes, “I wish I could warn her of what lies ahead.” The book has a quiet intimacy to it, and in his descriptions of landscape and travel, Hertmans’ prose is frequently lovely. In Narbonne, where David’s family lived, Hertmans describes “the cool of the paving stones in the late morning, the sound of doves’ wings flapping in the immaculate air.” But despite the drama of Hamoutal’s story, there is a static quality to the book, particularly in the sections where Hertmans describes his own travels. It’s an odd contradiction: Hertmans himself moves quickly through the world, but his book doesn’t quite move quickly enough.
Constructed with delicacy, lyricism, and care, Hertmans’ novel still feels occasionally static.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4708-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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