Still, despite such contrivances, Khadra’s latest is informed by a fine ironic intelligence, and its message is not an easy...
A bleak, terse tale in which a harsh fundamentalist culture suppresses individual liberty and summarily victimizes its citizens.
The setting is Afghanistan’s war-torn capitol city under Taliban rule, and still reeling from the catastrophic Russian invasion—during which, one character remembers, “the terrified swallows dispersed under a barrage of missiles.” These swallows are both literal and metaphoric, as is dramatized in the powerful opening scene, of a woman condemned as a prostitute being publicly stoned to death. The pseudonymous Khadra (Wolf Dreams, p. 704, etc.), who has been identified as a former Algerian army officer, then focuses in turn on major characters who, initially, cross one another’s paths but do not actually meet. Mohsen Ramat, a young intellectual, is caught up in the frenzy of the prostitute’s “execution,” participates in the stoning, and thereafter endangers his marriage by confessing this to his wife Zunaira, a former “lawyer, who worked for women’s rights.” Meanwhile, Atiq Shaukat, a wounded veteran of the Russian War now working as a prison guard, tortuously reexamines his own relationships to both his drastically changed homeland and his wife Musarrat, who had nursed him back to health and is now dying from a painful enervating disease. Khadra’s unflinching portrayal of the scorching, suppurating environment in which these people struggle not to be noticed, is quite effective. And his principal characters’ trials are ingeniously echoed in stark glimpses of other stunted, redirected figures (e.g., a cynical entrepreneur, an aged cripple obsessed by fantasies of escape). But Mohsen and Atiq declaim incessantly, creating static patches that stand out glaringly in this story’s short compass—and are only partially redeemed by a powerful climax in which Zunaira becomes everything she most despises, and the jailer Atiq becomes the prisoner of his own best—and most foolhardy—impulses.
Still, despite such contrivances, Khadra’s latest is informed by a fine ironic intelligence, and its message is not an easy one to shake off.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51001-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
Expect readers of this unpleasant hate poem to Budapest to cancel any plans they've made to travel there.
Budapest in 1995 is supposedly on the brink of post-communist economic revival, but the American expats who inhabit Keener’s second novel (Night Swim, 2013) can neither adjust to the city’s deep-seated complexity nor escape the problems they hoped to leave back home.
Annie and Will arrive with their adopted baby, Leo, so Will can pursue a startup creating “communication networks.” Unfortunately, Will, as seen through Annie’s eyes, is a research nerd with little aptitude for entrepreneurship. Annie hopes to escape what she considers intrusive involvement by the social worker who arranged Leo’s adoption. A one-time social worker herself (an irony Annie misses), she makes ham-handed attempts to help the locally hated Roma population. After eight months, Will has yet to close a deal when his former boss Bernardo, a glad-hander Annie doesn’t trust, shows up with an enticing offer. Bernardo hires Stephen, another expat, who has moved to Budapest to connect with his parents’ homeland; they fled Hungary for America after the 1956 uprising but never recovered emotionally. The story of his father’s suicide touches a chord in Annie, herself haunted by a tragic accident that destroyed her family’s happiness when she was 4. Meanwhile, 76-year-old Edward is in Budapest to track down his late daughter Deborah’s husband, Van. Edward believes Van murdered Deborah though the official cause of death was related to her multiple sclerosis. The only character besides Annie with a revealed inner life, Edward is embittered by his experience as a Jewish WWII soldier. He disapproved of Deborah’s hippie lifestyle and her attraction to men he considered losers, like Van. Over Will’s objections, and the readers’ disbelief, bleeding-heart Annie agrees to help Edward find Van. A bad idea. As for Budapest itself—polluted, in physical disrepair, plagued by an ugly history, and populated by rude, corrupt, and bigoted locals—the author strongly implies that the misery and mayhem Annie experiences are the city’s fault.
Expect readers of this unpleasant hate poem to Budapest to cancel any plans they've made to travel there.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61620-497-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
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