A stunning book—the great African writer’s great American novel.
“Professional mourner” Toloki (the protagonist of Mda’s Ways of Dying, 2002) makes his way to America in the versatile South African–born author’s colorful sixth novel.
Seeking new cultures to serve (since “the thrill of mourning was taken away by the sameness of the deaths I had to mourn on a daily basis”), Toloki arrives in 2004 in Kilvert, Ohio (near Athens), where by chance he becomes the house guest of Mahlon and Ruth Quigley, part of a motley community consisting of Caucasian, immigrant African and Native-American families. After inadvertently befriending the Quigley’s son Obed (who had committed an offensive Halloween prank), Toloki experiences the take-charge wrath of matriarch Ruth (a right-wing fundamentalist who adores President Bush), the virtually silent presence of Mahlon (a passive gardener who now “grows gnomes” and other decorative figures, instead of vegetables) and a burgeoning fascination with their daughter Orpah, a reclusive, sitar-playing beauty. The Quigleys’ story is then painstakingly connected to that of their ancestors: a complex tale of descent from Irish immigrants, miscegenation and enslavement, and the interpolated story of a gorgeous slave known as the Abyssinian Queen, who bore two sons to her white owner—and whose family’s history and destiny would subsequently be stitched into quilts created, first by the Queen, and, generations later, by the implacable Ruth. Mda (The Whale Caller, 2005, etc.) is at his matchless best when rendering both the stories “told” by the quilts (e.g., of the Queen’s sons Nicodemus and Abednego, runaway slaves who met diametrically different fates) and depicting the employment of the quilts (in accordance with African tradition) as “maps” guiding runaways to follow the North Star to freedom in (the earthly) “Canaan” (that is: Canada). The tale thus fashioned becomes an essential companion piece to such 20th-century masterpieces as Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Song of Solomon.
A stunning book—the great African writer’s great American novel.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-42706-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not quite idiomatic—for that there’s Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s version—but the translation moves easily...
“ ‘I don’t need any…translations,’ muttered Raskolnikov.” Well, of course he does, hence this new translation of an old standby of Russian-lit survey courses.
Driven to desperation, a morally sketchy young man kills and kills again. He gets away with it—at least for a while, until a psychologically astute cop lays a subtle trap. Throw in a woman friend who hints from the sidelines that he might just feel better confessing, and you have—well, maybe not Hercule Poirot or Kurt Wallender, but at least pretty familiar ground for an episode of a PBS series or Criminal Minds. The bare bones of that story, of course, are those of Crime and Punishment, published in 1866, when Dostoyevsky was well on the road from young democrat to middle-aged reactionary: thus the importance of confession, nursed along by the naughty lady of the night with the heart of gold, and thus Dostoyevsky’s digs at liberal-inclined intellectuals (“That’s what they’re like these writers, literary men, students, loudmouths…Damn them!”) and at those who would point to crimes great and small and say that society made them do it. So Rodion Raskolnikov, who does a nasty pawnbroker, “a small, dried-up miserable old woman, about sixty years old, with piercing, malicious little eyes, a small sharp nose, and her bare head,” in with an ax, then takes it to her sister for good measure. It’s to translator Katz’s credit that he gives the murder a satisfyingly grotty edge, with blood spurting and eyes popping and the like. Much of the book reads smoothly, though too often with that veneer of translator-ese that seems to overlie Russian texts more than any other; Katz's version sometimes seems to slip into Constance Garnett–like fustiness, as when, for instance, Raskolnikov calls Svidrigaylov "a crude villain...voluptuous debaucher and scoundrel.”
It’s not quite idiomatic—for that there’s Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s version—but the translation moves easily and legibly enough through Raskolnikov’s nasty deeds, game of cat and mouse, and visionary redemption.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63149-033-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.
Powers’ (Orfeo, 2014, etc.) 12th novel is a masterpiece of operatic proportions, involving nine central characters and more than half a century of American life.
In this work, Powers takes on the subject of nature, or our relationship to nature, as filtered through the lens of environmental activism, although at its heart the book is after more existential concerns. As is the case with much of Powers’ fiction, it takes shape slowly—first in a pastiche of narratives establishing the characters (a psychologist, an undergraduate who died briefly but was revived, a paraplegic computer game designer, a homeless vet), and then in the kaleidoscopic ways these individuals come together and break apart. “We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men,” Powers writes, quoting the naturalist John Muir. “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.” The idea is important because what Powers means to explore is a sense of how we become who we are, individually and collectively, and our responsibility to the planet and to ourselves. Nick, for instance, continues a project begun by his grandfather to take repeated photographs of a single chestnut tree, “one a month for seventy-six years.” Pat, a visionary botanist, discovers how trees communicate with one another only to be discredited and then, a generation later, reaffirmed. What links the characters is survival—the survival of both trees and human beings. The bulk of the action unfolds during the timber wars of the late 1990s, as the characters coalesce on the Pacific coast to save old-growth sequoia from logging concerns. For Powers, however, political or environmental activism becomes a filter through which to consider the connectedness of all things—not only the human lives he portrays in often painfully intricate dimensions, but also the biosphere, both virtual and natural. “The world starts here,” Powers insists. “This is the merest beginning. Life can do anything. You have no idea.”
A magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63552-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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