This second novel by Truman Capote is acute and contained, and provides an appealing modern folktale which is full of humor, tenderness and his particular type of antenna-awareness. Collin, a sixteen year old orphan, has the lead; he is sensitive, quiet, observant, allowing situations, other people and ideas to flow around him. He goes to live with his two cousins, Verena and Dolly Talbo, and theirs is a warm sort of kitchen life not unlike the kitchen of Carson McCullers' Member of the Wedding. Dolly is sixty and supposedly crazy; Verena is a frightening ramrod of a woman who becomes involved with a man named Morris Ritz; and there is also Catherine, a Negro, who stuffs cotton in her mouth instead of false teeth. Verena and Morris make plans to manufacture a dropsy remedy based on Dolly's secret formula, and when Dolly does not react favorably, Dolly and Collin and Catherine leave to go to live in a tree house where they establish a life of adventure, sought by the law and eventually by Verena herself. Meanwhile Morris Ritz has absconded with $12,700 plus $10,000 which was to buy the machinery to manufacture the formula... Warm and spirited, this is not a novel concerned with aberrations and abnormalities, though it is certainly pleasantly addled. It is also reminiscent of William Goyen's House of Breath in its use of the wind symbol and a poetic, fluid language.
Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0679745572
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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