For all its mystery and profundity, there's also much self-absorption in this traveler's tale, and its tone must be overcome...
The predecessor to Sebald's two acclaimed novels of history, memory, and melancholy—The Rings of Saturn (1998) and The Emigrants (1996)—is a lesser, more autobiographical work, yet it moves in elegant, unanticipated ways across time, the landscapes of Europe, and into the depths of human experience.
Starting with images of a young Stendhal in northern Italy, on the march with Napoleon as a teenager and later in the throes of a romance that was to fire his literary imagination, the narrator shifts abruptly to 1980 and a disconcerting trip to Vienna, Venice, and Verona, where his persistent unease gives way to full-fledged terror that sends him scrambling home to England. Determined to repeat the trip, in 1987, he has Kafka in mind as he nears Verona: K. had arrived there in 1913 in a state of mental distress and taken a cure at nearby Riva. Bypassing Verona to follow in K.'s footsteps, the narrator is sidetracked and winds up at a hotel, writing obsessively—whereupon his passport is stolen, he's nearly mugged, and he's in such a state that he no longer remembers where he is. When he does, he finally returns to Verona to complete his research, then decides to visit the Alpine village in southern Germany where he lived as a boy just after WWII and which he has not seen since. Awash in a flood of memories, anchored only by an old man who knew him well, he remembers the man's family, the blond barmaid he was fond of, the forester who died in a suspicious fall, and his bout with diphtheria. As winter comes he returns to England, bringing along the ghosts of his past.
For all its mystery and profundity, there's also much self-absorption in this traveler's tale, and its tone must be overcome occasionally to appreciate where the story is going.Pub Date: May 31, 2000
ISBN: 0-8112-1430-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
