A fierce and evocative telling of the strangled arc of a peace-loving people.
A young man’s journey of self-discovery illuminates the heart-wrenching history of the Chagos Archipelago, a little-known part of the world.
Coming-of-age in Mauritius, Désiré has always felt like an outsider. After all, he traces his ancestry back to Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. But why does his birth certificate claim he was born in Seychelles? And why is his pet name also the name of a boat? The answers lie in the history of Diego Garcia, a tranquil island in the Chagos Archipelago that found itself in the crosshairs of the Cold War. The island, which was part of the British Empire for decades, eventually became part of Mauritius after that island nation won independence. But in some convoluted international maneuvering, the United States requested that Diego Garcia be handed over, uninhabited, for use as a strategic military base. The result: a forced evacuation of thousands of citizens in just an hour in 1968; natives were eventually displaced to Seychelles or Mauritius. Désiré and his mother Raymonde’s story is set against this tragic backdrop. A pregnant Raymonde is forced to evacuate but gives birth while at sea. The infant Désiré is hastily given papers at Seychelles before being packed along to Mauritius. Patel, a Mauritian journalist, uses her cast of characters to narrate a keenly observed story, translated from French, about displacement. “Memory is a hook that sinks into your skin. The harder you pull, the more it tears your flesh, the deeper it sinks. There is no way to get it out without ripping your skin apart,” one of the characters points out. If at times the story reads like a thinly veiled history lesson and the nonlinear narrative feels gimmicky, it nevertheless serves an important function: to inform readers about the unseen collateral damage of geopolitical games of Risk. The bullies on the playground dictate the terms since they know the weaker players have no currency they can truly leverage.
A fierce and evocative telling of the strangled arc of a peace-loving people.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63206-234-5
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
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
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