bookshelf

I, TITUBA, BLACK WITCH OF SALEM

Name: I, TITUBA, BLACK WITCH OF SALEM
Author: Maryse Condé
ISBN: 0-8139-1398-5

by Maryse Condé ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1992

bookshelf

Caribbean-born CondÇ (Segu, 1987; The Children of Segu, 1989; and see below) gives questionable life to Tituba, one of the accused and subsequently released witches of Salem, in a novel of some conflicting purpose. In a lengthy afterword that includes an interview with the author, CondÇ claims to be expressing her opinion about present-day America, where ``little has changed since the days of the Puritans''; to be writing a postmodern mock epic in which she parodies the heroic epic—and contemporary feminism; and to be giving Tituba ``a reality that was denied to her because of her color and her gender.'' But these authorial claims and results seem frequently at odds in this story of Tituba, born on the island of Barbados to a slave raped by a British seaman. When her mother is hung for striking a white man, the child is raised by a local soothsayer who teaches her to summon the dead and heal with herbs. She marries handsome but weak John Indian; and when the couple is sold to the Reverend Samuel Parris, they accompany the Parris family to Salem. There, Tituba practices her healing, tries to help young Betsy Parris, but instead, caught up in the witch-hunt, is accused of trying to harm her. In prison, she meets Hester Prynne, and to defray the cost of her keep is sold to a Jewish widower, a victim of local prejudice, who, grateful for her bringing back his beloved dead, arranges for Tituba to return to Barbados. Back in her old cabin, she is killed when her lover, trying to organize a slave revolt, is betrayed. But Tituba goes on: ``Now that I've gone over to the invisible world I continue to heal and cure. But primarily I have dedicated myself to hardening men's hearts to fight.'' The confusion of ends doesn't help a book that has too obviously sacrificed a moving and dramatic story to agenda and fashion. Tituba deserves better.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-8139-1398-5

Page Count: 248

Publisher: Univ. of Virginia

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STORY OF THE CANNIBAL WOMAN
by Maryse Condé & translated by Richard Philcox

- BOOK REVIEW
WHO SLASHED CELANIRE’S THROAT?
by Maryse Condé & translated by Richard Philcox

- BOOK REVIEW
TALES FROM THE HEART
by Maryse Condé & translated by Richard Philcox

- IN THE NEWS
Maryse Condé Dies at 90

bookshelf

IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

by Genki Kawamura ; translated by Eric Selland ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

bookshelf

A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.

The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.

Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.

Pub Date: March 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

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.