A fine, excruciatingly delineated portrayal of the malevolent effects of war on a people.
The Zimbabwean war against British rule—and the subsequent civil turmoil of the 1980s—are backdrop for the author’s latest African tale of maimed, haunted lovers.
From the bustling city of Bulawayo, where Vera (Without a Name and Under the Tongue, 2002, etc.) was born, the road to rural Kezi brings the daily busload of commuting workers to stop at Thandabantu Store, which becomes the metaphorical hub of black life in Vera’s circular, elliptical narrative. There, a young woman named Thenjiwe spies a watchful, solitary man and allows him to follow her back to her house, where the two commence a breathless, two-month love affair. Yet the civil war intervenes (“the years of deafness and struggle”), and when the men and women soldiers return to their rural homes, they are changed irrevocably by the violence they have witnessed. In a shocking, brutal incident that seems to symbolize the country's sense of rupture and discontinuity, a traumatized soldier named Sibaso enters Thenjiwe’s home, which she shares with her beloved younger sister, Nonceba, decapitates the elder sister, then mutilates Nonceba, and vanishes. A suppression of memory and language ensues as part of Nonceba’s healing—until Thenjiwe’s former lover (significantly, he’s a museum archivist of “ancient kingdoms”) returns to offer her aid and a new life in Bulawayo. The tale is told with an intuitive grace and a palpable delight in metaphor (“You are beautiful like creation,” Thenjiwe’s lover exclaims ecstatically, while washing her with milk): The “stone virgins” painted on the rocks of Gulati, where Sibaso “takes shelter from the dead,” have been “saved from life’s embrace”—that is, from the chaos of the war. And the final burning of Thandabantu Store becomes the last devastating act in the evaporation of memory. The denouement about Nonceba’s new life in the city, however, is too briefly delivered, hinting at a sequel in her life’s saga.
A fine, excruciatingly delineated portrayal of the malevolent effects of war on a people.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-27008-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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