As eye-catching as graffiti, but lacking the emotional power of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2006).
This fourth and final novel by the acclaimed Ivoirian (1927–2003), published in France in 2000, combines an invented child-soldier’s story with that of a gallery of real warlords.
The narrator, Birahima, a ten-year-old who loves to cuss, belongs to the Malinké tribe of Ivory Coast—“Black Nigger African Natives”—a constant refrain; but Birahima has access to four different dictionaries, and he proudly parades definitions (an over-used device). In this way, Kourouma sets up a tension between the “primitive” and the “civilized.” The self-styled street kid drops out of village school after third grade (the dictionaries come later)—his father died young; his mother after injuries incurred in the ceremony of excision (clitoris removal). The village elders decide Birahima must join his aunt, who has fled from her abusive husband to Liberia, so in June 1993, he begins his journey, accompanied by Yacouba, a village hotshot, a money multiplier and marabout (fortune-teller) bedecked in grigris (amulets). This is a world saturated in history and superstitions, which coexist with Islam and Christianity; what’s new are the child soldiers in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Eager to join them, Birahima gets his chance soon enough and is given a kalash (AK-47). He participates in the killing, and sees fellow child-soldiers killed in a kind of dark vaudeville. His quest for his aunt is put on hold while the author offers thumbnail sketches of Liberian warlords such as Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson. Kourouma then delves (too deeply) into a ribald history of factional blood-letting in Sierra Leone; top billing goes to Foday Sankoh, that notorious amputator of hands and arms. ECOMOG, the Nigerian-dominated peacekeeping force, is also pilloried. The author’s implicit message is that all the players, religions included, have failed a generation of young Africans.
As eye-catching as graffiti, but lacking the emotional power of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (2006).Pub Date: May 8, 2007
ISBN: 0-307-27957-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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