A dark, buzzing, sometimes-chaotic literary noir written in lively and often elegant prose with an intriguing meditation on...
The latest from Domini (Movieola!, 2016, etc.) is a dark, brisk-paced, and intriguing—if sometimes slightly ungainly—hybrid.
In a Naples rattled by a major earthquake, the authorities are struggling to maintain a semblance of order, and those at the margins of the culture, especially the under-the-radar African refugees known as clandestini, find themselves even more vulnerable and imperiled than before. When one such immigrant is the victim of a grisly murder, Risto—a Somali-born Neapolitan who owns a prominent art gallery and is married to an Italian woman named Paola—decides to investigate, in part to aid the authorities and in part to pressure them into pursuing the case more energetically. Risto, orphaned in his teens and scarred by the trauma of those war-ravaged years in Mogadishu, soon finds himself plunged into an impassable thicket of mysteries and secrets (nothing and no one in this book is quite what it seems) and plagued by memories of his youth, by doubts about those close to him, and by a kind of hallucination, a nimbus of light. But the novel’s primary interest lies less in the surface mystery of the plot, which is nimbly constructed but familiar, than in Domini’s exploration of race, class, and immigration, of what it feels like to be at the dark, desperate fringes of a cosmopolitan European city, a proud old culture that demands assimilation at the same time that it keeps insisting there is a stigma of foreignness that can’t ever be shed.
A dark, buzzing, sometimes-chaotic literary noir written in lively and often elegant prose with an intriguing meditation on immigration and assimilation at its center.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945814-85-3
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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