The author’s take on fundamentalism can be polemic, but the characters, the poetry and the philosophical questions she...
Khan (Trespassing, 2004, etc.) fuses the romantic, the spiritual and the political in her story of two sisters in 1980s and ’90s Pakistan.
The same day that eight-year-old Amal finds an important fossil on a dig with her grandfather Zahoor, her baby sister Mehwish goes blind, supposedly from looking too long at the sun. Zahoor, a professor whose Darwinism is under attack by Islamists, encourages Amal’s curiosity, and she becomes a scientist, as well as Mehwish’s protector. Their grandfather also encourages Mehwish, who becomes a poet and narrates her sections of the novel in a playful made-up language combining English and Urdu. Six years after Mehwish loses her sight, the girls are noticed at one of Zahoor’s lectures by Noman, a young man whose father, a member of Zia’s Party of Creation bent on ridding Pakistan of Western science, has sent him to spy on the professor. An angry but dutiful son, Noman has relinquished his mathematical ambitions to write articles in his father’s name extolling strict adherence to Sharia, though he himself enjoys liquor and marijuana with nihilist friends. Meeting the enlightened Zahoor changes Noman’s life; he is increasingly torn between family loyalty and his intellectual awakening. When Zahoor is arrested, Noman blames himself and breaks with his father, then takes a job teaching math. Meanwhile, Amal, who also blames Noman, becomes a lab assistant (as a woman she is barred from doing actual fieldwork) and eventually agrees to marry longtime sweetheart Omar only if he will allow her independence. Noman, once drawn to Amal, discovers genuine, spiritual love for Mehwish, who slowly responds. As these private lives are about to reach fulfillment, political realities hone in. The consequences are tragic but not insurmountable.
The author’s take on fundamentalism can be polemic, but the characters, the poetry and the philosophical questions she raises are rendered with a power and beauty that make this novel linger in the mind and heart.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56656-774-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Clockroot Books/Interlink
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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