A raw, sensual odyssey of sex and faith in chaotic, alluring modern-day West Africa.
Thorpe’s (Incompetence, 2015) vivid, impressionistic novel about a Westerner’s strange travels around Mali.
Hank Westland, an American convert to Islam, lives a dissolute life in Bamako, Mali, getting drunk every night and bedding a procession of African women. But his mind is elsewhere, far away; in Timbuktu, his friend professor Kati has been accused of sorcery by a Tuareg extremist militant group called Ansar Dine, and he’s being held in a captivity that he may not survive. Westland wants to travel to save his friend, but first he must go see Al Hajj Tidjani, the leader of the Umarian Tidjanniya order that the American has recently joined as a new convert. He arrives at the compound and greets the wily, enigmatic leader, his wives, and their various daughters; their worldview, inspired by idiosyncratic readings of the Quran and the Hadith, quickly begins to challenge his complacency on a variety of issues. As a Christian minister’s son, he’d spent years teaching at a college in the Pacific Northwest, a laid-back, easygoing area where “a bumper-sticker often seen around town read, ‘Mean People Suck.’ ” By contrast, Westland reflects about West Africa, “You lived here in one day more than most people did in twenty years in the U.S.” His experiences in the camp reel wildly from his usual priapism to steep discussions of various Islamic subjects; an in-camp circumcision scene, though, may have every male reader reflexively wincing. Thorpe’s narrative is lushly sensuous, wonderfully capturing the textures and contradictions of Muslim life in Mali and also offering thought-provoking digressions into the nature of Islam (“The true hajj does not mean traveling to Mecca,” Westland learns at one point, for example. “The true hajj is the hajj to the point of mercy at the very center of your spiritual being”). The result is a somewhat jumbled but instantly memorable novel in the spirit of Paul Bowles’ work.
A raw, sensual odyssey of sex and faith in chaotic, alluring modern-day West Africa.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5075-5000-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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