A work of extraordinary richness, suffused with genuine mythic power: comparable to the recently discovered fiction of Moses...
A brilliant central metaphor ties together several gripping stories in this compact epic novel (winner of a recent Commonwealth Fiction prize) from the South African author of Ways of Dying (below).
The western coastal village of Qolorha is where Camugu, a 40ish former resident of Johannesburg, comes after several years of chosen “exile” in America, where he became a “communications specialist.” Communication is precisely what’s lacking in Qolorha past and present, as Camugu discovers when his insistent sex drive thrusts him into various romantic and political rivalries and intrigues. For the village—and, by extension, the “new Africa” itself (upon the point of the death of apartheid)—is defined by a conflict that reaches back nearly 150 years: to the story of the amaXhosa tribe, who were persuaded by a teenaged seer named Nonquawuse to slaughter their cattle as a sacrifice to their gods, after which the amaXhosas’ ancestors would arise from their graves and dispel the British invaders who had subjugated their people. This resonant story (also told in John Edgar Wideman’s The Cattle Killing [1996]) of folly and self-destruction hovers over the present-day village, where descendants of “Believers” (who followed the seer’s instructions) and “Unbelievers” (who resisted), led by rival patriarchs Zim and Bhonco, carryon a “war” that provokes them to disagree in every imaginable situation. Mda explores both the comic and the tragic consequences of this contention to marvelous effect, in a fascinating dual narrative that contrasts the story of believer (Zim’s son) Twin’s ill-fated love for Bhonco’s Western-educated, “progressive” daughter Xoliswa with Camugu’s various pursuits of an elusive amaXhosa woman (NomaRussia), “educating” his retrograde homeland, and rediscovering his own “redness” (i.e., his ethnic identity—compromised and lost during his years in America).
A work of extraordinary richness, suffused with genuine mythic power: comparable to the recently discovered fiction of Moses Izegawa and Emmanuel Dongala—and not unworthy of comparison with the masterpieces of Chinua Achebe.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-52834-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.
A first novel from Pulitzer-winner Lahiri (stories: Interpreter of Maladies, 1999) focuses on the divide between Indian immigrants and their Americanized children.
The action takes place in and around Boston and New York between 1968 and 2000. As it begins, Ashoke Ganguli and his pregnant young wife Ashima are living in Cambridge while he does research at MIT. Their marriage was arranged in Calcutta: no problem. What is a problem is naming their son. Years before in India, a book by Gogol had saved Ashoke’s life in a train wreck, so he wants to name the boy Gogol. The matter becomes contentious and is hashed out at tedious length. Gogol grows to hate his name, and at 18 the Beatles-loving Yale freshman changes it officially to Nikhil. His father is now a professor outside Boston; his parents socialize exclusively with other middle-class Bengalis. The outward-looking Gogol, however, mixes easily with non-Indian Americans like his first girlfriend Ruth, another Yalie. Though Lahiri writes with painstaking care, her dry synoptic style fails to capture the quirkiness of relationships. Many scenes cry out for dialogue that would enable her characters to cut loose from a buttoned-down world in which much is documented but little revealed. After an unspecified quarrel, Ruth exits. Gogol goes to work as an architect in New York and meets Maxine, a book editor who seems his perfect match. Then his father dies unexpectedly—the kind of death that fills in for lack of plot—and he breaks up with Maxine, who like Ruth departs after a reported altercation (nothing verbatim). Girlfriend number three is an ultrasophisticated Indian academic with as little interest in Bengali culture as Gogol; these kindred spirits marry, but the restless Moushumi proves unfaithful. The ending finds the namesake alone, about to read the Russian Gogol for the first time.
A disappointingly bland follow-up to a stellar story collection.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-395-92721-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.
Inseparable identical twin sisters ditch home together, and then one decides to vanish.
The talented Bennett fuels her fiction with secrets—first in her lauded debut, The Mothers (2016), and now in the assured and magnetic story of the Vignes sisters, light-skinned women parked on opposite sides of the color line. Desiree, the “fidgety twin,” and Stella, “a smart, careful girl,” make their break from stultifying rural Mallard, Louisiana, becoming 16-year-old runaways in 1954 New Orleans. The novel opens 14 years later as Desiree, fleeing a violent marriage in D.C., returns home with a different relative: her 8-year-old daughter, Jude. The gossips are agog: “In Mallard, nobody married dark....Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far.” Desiree's decision seals Jude’s misery in this “colorstruck” place and propels a new generation of flight: Jude escapes on a track scholarship to UCLA. Tending bar as a side job in Beverly Hills, she catches a glimpse of her mother’s doppelgänger. Stella, ensconced in White society, is shedding her fur coat. Jude, so Black that strangers routinely stare, is unrecognizable to her aunt. All this is expertly paced, unfurling before the book is half finished; a reader can guess what is coming. Bennett is deeply engaged in the unknowability of other people and the scourge of colorism. The scene in which Stella adopts her White persona is a tour de force of doubling and confusion. It calls up Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the book's 50-year-old antecedent. Bennett's novel plays with its characters' nagging feelings of being incomplete—for the twins without each other; for Jude’s boyfriend, Reese, who is trans and seeks surgery; for their friend Barry, who performs in drag as Bianca. Bennett keeps all these plot threads thrumming and her social commentary crisp. In the second half, Jude spars with her cousin Kennedy, Stella's daughter, a spoiled actress.
Kin “[find] each other’s lives inscrutable” in this rich, sharp story about the way identity is formed.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-53629-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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