Rich material in need of a firmer authorial hand.
A young Somali racks up lots of miles in this combination coming-of-age/adventure story, the author’s debut, set in the Horn of Africa in the 1930s.
Can a snake bring good luck? Ambaro thought so. When the teenage Somali was pregnant, a black mamba nestled over her belly. This happened in Hargeisa, her ancestral home (it’s also the author’s birthplace). Her son Jama was born without complications, but the good luck failed to materialize. Her husband Guure, an impractical dreamer, left them to find work in Sudan. The novel opens in Aden, in Arabia, in 1935. Ambaro is working in a coffee factory; Jama is a scrappy 11-year-old, running the streets, until his mother sickens and dies, when relatives ship him back to Hargeisa. Somalis are sustained by a strong network of clans; they are also nomadic. Jama’s family philosophy is to keep moving, and soon enough Jama leaves on a quest for his father. Whether on foot, by lorry, by train or by ship, Jama never stops traveling—first to Djibouti, then Eritrea, and eventually, in the 1940s, to Egypt, Palestine and Europe. East Africa is controlled by the British, French and Italians; Mussolini’s invading army is on the march. In Eritrea, Jama learns his father, a deserter from the Italian army, has been killed. His life has become a roller coaster. His parents’ ghosts twice intervene to save him from death. With one glorious exception, an eccentric intellectual in Djibouti, the author shows little talent for characterization. Jama is a blank slate on which the author writes cultural and colonial history. When his father’s ghost tells him to go to Egypt, he leaves his young Eritrean bride after one night. Later, in Palestine, he realizes he may be on a fool’s errand, another “poster boy of failed migration.” Pulled this way and that, Jama reflects Mohamed’s own indecision, torn between naturalism and magic realism.
Rich material in need of a firmer authorial hand.Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-11419-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.
Even within the author’s extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a novel that demands to be read and reread.
McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.) pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy’s fiction has been set in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son calls the father “Papa”). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened—apocalypse? holocaust?—and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the “good guys,” carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are “bad guys,” cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. In their encounters along their pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the boy emerges as the novel’s moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a sweetness that represents all that’s good in a universe where conventional notions of good and evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival—through which those who wish they’d never been born struggle to persevere—there are glimmers of comedy in an encounter with an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool. Though the sentences of McCarthy’s recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry.
A novel of horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-26543-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
