Patricia Highsmith by way of Kathy Acker in a highbrow thriller that says as much about its writer as its story.
A grieving mother becomes obsessed with a famous photograph of a child fleeing a war zone.
Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase, 2012, etc.) made an impression with her transgressive memoir The Chronology of Water, and her new novel features similar plot points and themes. The primary narrator (all except one of the characters are unnamed) is a bisexual writer, a recovering heroin addict, a wife, the mother of a dead daughter and a “strange and alive boy.” She has become fixated on the subject of a photograph from an Eastern European conflict that portrays a young girl running away from the explosion that destroyed her home and killed her family. In recounting her life and art, the writer loosely describes a group of friends and family that includes her brother, the playwright; her husband, the filmmaker; her former lover the combat photojournalist; a deeply damaged performance artist; and her best friend, a fiercely ambisexual poet. None of these characters is particularly interesting, and they merely serve as players in the writer’s ruminations on art and the violent, sexually charged sections that follow. When the writer collapses and is hospitalized, presumably from the weight of her grief, the poet becomes convinced they need to travel overseas to find the girl in the photo and bring her to safety. The narrative largely collapses into literary experimentalism at this point, with chapters posed as screenplays, fragmented imagery, poetry, minimalism, and white space substituted for storytelling. This isn’t necessarily a negative—Yuknavitch is a gifted writer whose dizzying passages are often as compelling as they are grotesque. But it’s not a pretty story, and the novel’s affected musings on the nature of art, gratuitous sexual excesses, and casual violence may overpower the grace of its words for some readers.
Patricia Highsmith by way of Kathy Acker in a highbrow thriller that says as much about its writer as its story.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-238324-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
PROFILES
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
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