Tightly plotted, this fierce literary thriller packs complex emotions in a small space, tackling difficult and essential...
A colonel fleeing the repressive Theological Republic confronts a former prisoner in an unnamed northern European nation.
French-Iranian author Hachtroudi’s English-language debut, told mainly through intense first-person narration, follows the colonel’s final attempts at gaining asylum. A confidant of the Supreme Commander in his home country, he has been questioned repeatedly for five years, denying his participation in the regime’s program of kidnapping and torture. His translator at this last interrogation at the Office for Refugees and Stateless Persons turns out to be “455,” a prisoner famous for her staunch resistance to naming names. Their alternating voices are intimate and well-etched. The colonel reveals the shaky status of his quest through short, choppy sentences: “They never get tired. There is always some point that needs clarifying. Some missing element. They have nothing better to do.” The translator’s voice is more fluid: “Does language, any language, flow more easily when the subject is love?” That question becomes the crux of the story. In a frightening turn, the colonel stalks the translator, but they soon form an uneasy connection over relationships rent apart by the violence of the totalitarian regime. Because of the narration’s deeply internal monologue, events unfold nonlinearly, and it is not always clear when an event has actually occurred. Nor is it always clear when characters are actually speaking to one another or imagining conversations they would like to have with people far out of reach. This murkiness feels appropriate to the territory of traumatic memories, self-delusion, double-dealings, and half-truths.
Tightly plotted, this fierce literary thriller packs complex emotions in a small space, tackling difficult and essential questions about power and our responsibilities to one another.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60945-306-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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