The Weary Generations ($36.95; Sept. 3; 334 pp.; 0-7206-1062-1). This prizewinning 1963 novel, originally written in Urdu by its Indian-born author, is a leisurely, vividly dramatic chronicle of the first half-century of India’s modern history. The appealing protagonist Naim is a peasant’s son who grows up dazzled by the glamour and sophistication of the British Raj, fights for Great Britain in WWI (and loses an arm), is swept up after the war into pro-Muslim (and anti-British) political activity and subsequently imprisoned, and wins, then loses the love of the beautiful high-born girl he hopefully marries. In a devastating stroke of climactic irony, when Independence arrives in 1947, Naim finds himself again “imprisoned” by his caste and his loyalties: a man without a country whose fate is, paradoxically, a mirror image of India’s own. Altogether, a brilliant work: one of the great fictional portrayals of the Raj and a sobering, very moving human document.
Pub Date: Sept. 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-7206-1062-1
Page Count: 334
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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