A slim little surprise of delightful whimsy: Umberto Eco would definitely approve.
Getting shipwrecked doesn’t have to be so bad.
Ten-year-old Jeanne and her older brother Thomas don’t get along, which isn’t much of a surprise. In fact, not much is a surprise as Orsenna (Love and Empire, 1991, etc.) begins here. Jeanne and Thomas seem just your average precocious and slightly pampered French children who happen to be on an ocean liner to America—until, that is, the liner sinks in a storm and the kids are swept up on a deserted shore. The first sign that something is out of the ordinary—that we’re not reading just the tale of two children surviving on a lonely island—comes when Thomas and Jeanne discover pages of a dictionary washing up on the beach (there was a Scrabble tournament on the boat), still impossibly legible after floating in the sea. Jeanne is delighted and starts snatching the pages up, thinking she’d like to cover her body in them: “They would have caressed and soothed me in the unobtrusive, slightly unsettling way that words have.” The island turns out hardly to be deserted. A kindly older man named Monsieur Henri swiftly appears and takes the little survivors on a tour of a place more than a little magical and quite definitely metaphoric. Here, words are free, not imprisoned by and always waiting on people. Instead, they’re living tribes that occasionally have dealings with each other, sometimes even getting married to words from different tribes. All this isn’t just fantasy and fun, since Orsenna has some grammar lessons to teach the young readers who are presumably his targeted audience. But in this tiny French bestseller (260,000 copies sold so far, we’re told), he imparts the lessons delightfully, making examples of things like the nouns and articles (they’re always together) who go shopping in stores run by adjectives, since the adjectives help the nouns and articles feel less cold and naked.
A slim little surprise of delightful whimsy: Umberto Eco would definitely approve.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8076-1531-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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