Flawed or not, a terrific introduction to a world-class literary talent.
This first (1995) novel by the South African playwright and author of The Heart of Redness (above) creates a vivid, bustling image of contemporary Africa in transition from the unusual symbiotic relationship between a bereaved former prostitute and a stoical “professional mourner.”
In a time when government officials and revolutionary “liberators” alike are orchestrating wholesale slaughter of innocent villagers, middle-aged Toloki supports himself as an itinerant paid mourner who grieves publicly at strangers’ funerals. During one unusual Christmas Day burial service, he encounters Noria, once a notoriously wild young girl in their common home village, whose young son has been murdered. They form a strange, sexless union: a premise that, though it provides relatively little in the way of drama, initiates a rhythmic alternation of present-day experiences (rife with political violence and peril) with extended flashbacks to their (briefly) shared and (mostly) separate pasts. We learn a great deal about Toloki’s conflicted relationship with his harsh father Jwara (a blacksmith and would-be artisan) and the manner in which Toloki has sublimated his own artistic gifts, and also about Noria’s difficulties with her aloof majestic mother (“That Mountain Woman”) and the vagrant sexual life to which she was eventually driven. A communal voice (“we live our lives as one”) tells their stories, also layering in colorful related tales involving such striking characters as the wily pragmatic taxicab driver Shadrack, a vainglorious archbishop (whose “war” with the young Toloki is one of several such conflicts that echo the country’s larger one), Nefolovhowe the coffin-maker, and a compassionate “twilight mum” (Madimvhaza) who cares for abandoned children. Their several stories cohere to underscore the insight that has shaped Toloki’s life: “Death lives with us every day. Indeed our ways of dying are our ways of living.” The story falters in its final third, and it’s a mess structurally almost from start to finish. But that’s largely irrelevant, in a charming narrative that has the incremental repetitive quality of a folk ballad spun out through successive generations.
Flawed or not, a terrific introduction to a world-class literary talent.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-42091-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
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
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"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
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