Poignant meditation on the enduring lure of home and the cost of being left behind.
After decades in France, a Moroccan immigrant yearns to return to his native village.
Retirement holds little appeal for former autoworker Mohammed Ben Abdallah, who would just as soon keep on going to the Renault plant that has been his home-away-from-home for the past 40 years. The sudden (if not unexpected) loss of his workday routine has him at loose ends, leaving him too much time to ponder his life and contemplate its end. Four out of his five children are grown and out of the house, and he barely speaks to his wife, who is also his cousin. He loves his kids, but wishes they were less European. Their disinterest in their heritage eats away at him. Coming across as a thoroughly decent man, Mohammed takes great comfort in his Muslim faith, and has nothing but contempt for the imams in his community who foment radicalism. He is still, though, a product of his culture. He disowns his daughter Jamila when she chooses to marry an Italian man, and is only somewhat cognizant of the political unrest in the French immigrant community. He understandably finds it difficult to comprehend why a group of local youths would burn down his car. And it is this discomfort with the modernity of his adopted home that spurs him to take a trip back to his village, where he is building a home. Hoping to use the house to lure his family back to the Magreb, he builds an extravagant mansion that defies both taste and common sense. Energized by his new purpose, but unaware of the reality of the situation, he slips into a mystical state that makes it increasingly impossible for the family he values so much to reach him. Jelloun’s (Leaving Tangier, 2009, etc.) haunting novel reads like a timeless fable, while taking on the oh-so-timely challenges of the immigrant experience.
Poignant meditation on the enduring lure of home and the cost of being left behind.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-14-311847-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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