A beguiling amalgam of realistic fiction, religious parable, animal fable and moral argument. Mda goes from strength to...
A man, a woman and a whale enact an eerie love triangle in this dreamlike fifth novel from the South African author of The Madonna of Excelsior (2004).
In the resort town of Hermanus, on South Africa’s western coast, tourists come to whale-watch, and the otherwise unnamed title character scorns them, keeping watch for the seasonal visits of the female right whale, which he names Sharisha and serenades with his homemade kelp horn. The whale caller is a 60ish pensioner who lives on macaroni and cheese and has no interests beyond his Sharisha—to the intense annoyance of female “village drunk” Saluni, who sets her cap for him, moves in with him and tries to civilize him, but never breaks through his primordial closeness to the sea creature that seemingly responds to his adoration (making sinuous “dancelike” movements, to the sound of his horn). One suspects allegorical contrasts among the primitive simplicity of immemorial Africa that the whale caller appears to embody, the emergent—and urgent—demand for entitlement and inclusion represented by Saluni’s hunger for attention and love, and perhaps a hint of the Dark Continent’s dark future in the jaded behavior of “angelic” twin girls, on whom Saluni fiercely dotes, and whose willful misbehavior masks strong undercurrents of sadism and violence. Its principal human characters’ comic bickering (perhaps a shade too reminiscent of Athol Fugard’s celebrated play Boesman and Lena) adds welcome dimension, as do the whale caller’s confessional importunings to Mr. Yodd, an unseen being who lives in a grotto and functions as a peculiarly unresponsive local Delphic Oracle. And Mda brings all to a smashing climax as a “freak wave” irreparably alters both the face of Hermanus and the heart of the whale caller’s intense oneness with the world beyond the town.
A beguiling amalgam of realistic fiction, religious parable, animal fable and moral argument. Mda goes from strength to strength.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-28785-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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