A chilling portrait of painful attempts to reconcile past colonial sins with crying present needs.
An Algerian singer finds his star waning with the onslaught of the Islamic revolution—in musician-playwright Chouaki’s politically trenchant third novel, his first to appear in English.
It’s 1990 when, in Algiers, the first rumblings by Islamist extremists are heeded by the disaffected and largely impoverished populace. Méziane Boudjiri, known as Moussa Massy on stage, is 36 and a singer of modern Kabyle (African Berber) music who lives in three rooms with fourteen of his family members in a soulless apartment block called Cité Mer et Soleil. Moussa is handsome, scornful of the “beards,” and determined to make a name for himself and to quit the grinding despair of his country. Yet, despite his stint of well-paying gigs, Moussa’s income goes to help support his family, and marriage to the lovely, sheltered Fatiha is out of the question without an apartment of his own. With a smooth, wealthy diplomat’s son, Rachid, acting as his manager, Moussa gains a newspaper interview and is hired to play at upscale clubs frequented by the European-educated upper class; his name is well known and he even begins to record his music—before it’s pirated and adulterated without his consent. Moussa’s star seems to be inexorably tied to the fate of his country: with the takeover by the Islamists, his fellow musicians flee the country, his girlfriend’s traditional family forces her to marry a more suitable cousin, and the fancy club Moussa works for becomes a den of thugs. “Day after day, Moussa deteriorates, at the same pace of Algeria, allegro,” Chouaki writes in his dictation-like prose, switching briefly from third person to first and jotting off strings of graphic impressions. Chouaki’s spurts of slangy dialogue read a bit stilted in English, but the overall result is viscerally affecting. Descending into drug abuse, apathy, and violence, Moussa is eventually transformed into the same fanatic, cold-blooded Jihadist he once reviled.
A chilling portrait of painful attempts to reconcile past colonial sins with crying present needs.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55597-412-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
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"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
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