A provocative post-apartheid novel that raises troubling questions about the role of women, Coloreds, and other non-African...
The publisher’s latest entry in the Women Writing Africa series: a postmodern tale of the new South Africa that brings a rich sense of allusion, irony, and the past to the dangers the hero, a Griqua descendant of the original Khoi inhabitants, faces when he finds his life threatened in an increasingly African nationalist milieu.
Referring frequently to writers as diverse as Joyce, Morrison, and Breytenbach, Wicomb (You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town, not reviewed) demonstrates an easy familiarity with the local—especially the Colored—vernacular as she tells spins a yarn that’s part history, part political analysis, and part thriller. She picks up David Dirkse’s story in 1991, a year after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, as South Africans adjust to the end of apartheid. David’s Colored (mixed-race) mother-in-law, Ouma Sarie, now feels free enough to visit the renovated Logan Hotel, where she worked as a maid for 50 years. Her daughter Sally, a former guerrilla now married to David and mother of two children, is finding domesticity boring; not only that but she suspects there’s another woman in David’s life. Which there is: a shadowy, even symbolic, presence called Dulcie, a guerrilla who was tortured and raped by both sides. David, a dedicated freedom fighter still working for the African National Congress, decides to visit Kokstad in East Griqualand to research his family. There, he learns more about his Griqua ancestor Andrew le Fleur, who, seeing his land taken over by white farmers, led a rebellion, was imprisoned by the British, and then, once free, led the Griquas west into the desert. But David finds that the Struggle is not over: he has enemies, possibly in the ANC itself, and his name is on a hit list.
A provocative post-apartheid novel that raises troubling questions about the role of women, Coloreds, and other non-African minorities in the new South Africa.Pub Date: April 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-55861-251-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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