A fine, excruciatingly delineated portrayal of the malevolent effects of war on a people.
The Zimbabwean war against British rule—and the subsequent civil turmoil of the 1980s—are backdrop for the author’s latest African tale of maimed, haunted lovers.
From the bustling city of Bulawayo, where Vera (Without a Name and Under the Tongue, 2002, etc.) was born, the road to rural Kezi brings the daily busload of commuting workers to stop at Thandabantu Store, which becomes the metaphorical hub of black life in Vera’s circular, elliptical narrative. There, a young woman named Thenjiwe spies a watchful, solitary man and allows him to follow her back to her house, where the two commence a breathless, two-month love affair. Yet the civil war intervenes (“the years of deafness and struggle”), and when the men and women soldiers return to their rural homes, they are changed irrevocably by the violence they have witnessed. In a shocking, brutal incident that seems to symbolize the country's sense of rupture and discontinuity, a traumatized soldier named Sibaso enters Thenjiwe’s home, which she shares with her beloved younger sister, Nonceba, decapitates the elder sister, then mutilates Nonceba, and vanishes. A suppression of memory and language ensues as part of Nonceba’s healing—until Thenjiwe’s former lover (significantly, he’s a museum archivist of “ancient kingdoms”) returns to offer her aid and a new life in Bulawayo. The tale is told with an intuitive grace and a palpable delight in metaphor (“You are beautiful like creation,” Thenjiwe’s lover exclaims ecstatically, while washing her with milk): The “stone virgins” painted on the rocks of Gulati, where Sibaso “takes shelter from the dead,” have been “saved from life’s embrace”—that is, from the chaos of the war. And the final burning of Thandabantu Store becomes the last devastating act in the evaporation of memory. The denouement about Nonceba’s new life in the city, however, is too briefly delivered, hinting at a sequel in her life’s saga.
A fine, excruciatingly delineated portrayal of the malevolent effects of war on a people.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-27008-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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