• Rated 5 stars

“Not as radical an experiment in narrative voice, stream of consciousness, and point of view as Sound and the Fury or Absolom, Absolom, and not as tightly structured and ironic as As I Lay Dying, but of Faulkner's big four novels, this is unquestionably the most wrrenching, with its absolute taking apart of the whole guilty secret of the southern racial taboo. You start out wondering how cold-hearted, pernicious individuals like the protagonist Joe Christmas ever get that way--and eventually you find out. And no, his name is no accident. The book is built symbolically around a retelling of the Christ story, with Joe as a kind of dark version of Jesus on a quest to sacrifice himself for the sins of the world. It is full of memorable characters, the indomitably naive madonna figure, Lena Grove; the self-sacrificing Joseph figure, Byron Bunch; and a whole slew of deranged prophets, including Joe's grandfather Doc Hines. It's not an easy read, of course. Hey, even if it's more accessible than Faulkner's other monumental works, it's still Faulkner. The mystery of Joe's birth and childhood and ultimately the drama of his murder drift into place slowly, leaving the reader to struggle for the first half of the book assembling the fragments of the tale. But it's well worth the effort in the end. ”

peter b wrote this review yesterday. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“I remember the feeling of awe I had when I got about three-quarters of the way through this book, thinking to myself, "Oh my God, who would think that someone would come along in my adult lifetime who would be every bit worthy of comparison to Twain, Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce--and even in a way would outdo them all, for she uses their trademark irony, radical experiments in point of view, and stream of consciousness narration simultaneously on two intertwined themes of daunting complexity, race and gender." Beloved is not a perfect novel. The description of Halle's insanity is over-the-top melodrama worthy of the nineteenth century stage. But when Morrison is at the top of her game, as for instance in the stream of consciousness soliloquys by Denver, Beloved, and Sethe at the end of the novel, she beats any living writer. A true classic walking among us. Treasure her! ”

peter b wrote this review Friday, October 17 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Morrison's first major effort, and not on a par with Beloved, certainly, but still a terrific novel, with Morrison's trademark brutal honesty and unflinching eye for ugly truths of life. The fragile psyche of a black girl from a dysfunctional marriage is shattered by her slavish admiration of the ideal of white feminity and beauty, as represented in Hollywood icons like the child star Shirley Temple. Two young age-mates try to save the young girl, Pecola, from a world that treats her as worthless and ugly. It's a kind of Native Son for the late twentieth century, with a hard-edged perspective not only on race but also gender. A magnificent accomplishment! ”

peter b wrote this review Friday, October 17 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“I love the language of a good translation of this work (mine's by Rolfe Humphries)--and never cease to be amazed both at how raw and outrageous some of the tales are, and at how they reveal the interrelatedness of the ancient world. For instance, Jove, like God of the Old Testament, wants to destroy humankind as punishment for their utter evil, but relents and saves two people from the flood he sends to finish off the race. (They survive not in an ark but on a mountaintop.) Ovid also has his own Sodom and Gamorah story--the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. As in the Old Testament, it's a tale of a man leading a woman out of a place of horror--in this case Hades, not a city about to be buried under fire and brimstone. But in this tale it isn't the woman who looks back, thereby condemning herself to oblivion, but the man who looks back to be sure she's still following him. Thus does his lack of trust condemn her back to hell. I guess most people know that story. What most people forget though is that afterwards he shuns women, goes to live on a mountainside, and decides to take sexual consolation in young boys. Weirdly, the very thing that sours Lot in the Old Testament on the city of Sodom is the way the citizens there demand to have gay sex with the angels who come to visit him. Strange! My favorite tale in the Metamorphoses is probably the tale of Jove and Io--because the whole story is so funny in its depiction of a philandering husband and enraged wife. Poor Io, the reluctant other woman who gets turned into a heifer, really has a tough life as a result of the war between Jove and Juno.”

peter b wrote this review Thursday, July 10 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“I found this book (or rather these two books) delightful, full of wry twists and turns of incident and outlandish details of invention, despite being expressed in the broken idiom of a school dropout. Tutuola has certainly provoked a lot of controversy, however. Originally promoted (by, among others, T. S. Eliot, then an editor at Faber and Faber) as a naive fabulist, creating wild and original demonic landscapes out of a fertile, if unschooled imagination, Tutuola was later scanted by Nigerian critics and writers as a national disgrace and embarrassment promoted by western critics and publicists to demean Africa's rising generation of sophisticated writers. His English was substandard, his detractors charged, and his tales of demonic spirits from the afterlife were mostly simply lifted from traditional oral tales. The praise for Tutuola might have been founded on false assumptions about Africa, but to me the tales remain beguiling, despite the fractured English usage. Literature has room for all sorts of creativity--both a Soyinka or Ngugi and a Tutuola, it seems to me. ”

peter b wrote this review Monday, June 30 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“This is my third novel by Abani (I haven't yet read Remembering Abigail). It's a novel of child soldiers in civil war, with the Biafran War more or less the setting, though he doesn't really make much effort to render it in a historically-accurate way. The novel works more like a sort of horrific dream that could come out of any African civil war. Its main character is a boy just into puberty who has been conscripted into a ragtag guerilla band with a group of other children who are trained to walk deliberately into minefields to find and defuse mines. They have had their voice boxes slit so that they can't scream in fear or anguish (or talk). And yes, it's a horrifying series of images of children in war. It's a very different book from either GraceLand or Virgin of the Flames, though very much worthy of comparison to the former. It's no page-turner, but it's really powerful (it has a dreamlike quality that is at once harrowing and beautful). It reminds you of a sort of African Hickleberry Finn--if that novel took place during a brutal war and the main character's sidekick were a beautiful adolescent girl rather than a grown man of a different race. Its pace is slow, circular, its images mythic in their weird multiformity. It reads more like a fractured dream vision than a realistic slice of life--more like the film Apocalypse Now than the novel Half of a Yellow Sun. You drift along with it rather than race forward intent on getting to the end quickly. Personally, I think the whole I-couldn't-put-it-down thing is overrated. Sometimes you can't put a book down because the author plays tricks on you to provoke your idle curiosity. You can feel a bit used when you do finish a book like that, as if you've wasted your time chasing trivial sensations. This book is about the big issues, such as why people do such awful things to each other in times of crisis, and how people keep some sense of individual worth in spite of all. And even though Abani's landscape of war is entirely imaginary, he makes it feel hauntingly real.”

peter b wrote this review Saturday, June 21 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“My favorite Shakespeare play, despite it's bizarre take on Euorpe's relationship with the non-European world. Prospero, a reclusive wizard and intellectual, has been exiled to a tropical island, ostensibly in the Mediterranian, but by imaginative projection and symbolic reference really in the Caribbean. Chance, and a captive spirit of Prospero's, throw the men who plotted his overthrow as Duke of Milan into his hands. You think at first this is going to be a grisly revenge tragedy, but instead Prospero reveals a spirit of renunciation and forgiveness. Real heart-warming stuff! Or it would be, if his charity and benevolence were universal. But they don't extend to a suspiciously equivocal chracter, Prospero's slave, Caliban, whose "race" marks him as fit for nothing but lashes, curses, and hard labor. Tradition holds the best speech in the play to be the one at the end where Prospero renounces all his "charms," and commends his soul to justice and mercy. But my own personal favorite is the speech where Caliban defies Prospero to torture him (a la Guantanamo) for his alleged transgressions and declares that he is not the least bit grateful for anything that Prospero has done ("The red plague rid you for learning me your language"). Its resonance for despised and oppressed people everywhere is unmistakable. Caliban demands his birthright and refuses to be cowed by threats of retribution. What could be truer and more real than that?”

peter b wrote this review Saturday, June 14 2008. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 4 stars

“Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun started really slowly for me. Maybe that was my fault. I just found it hard to be curious about the lives of the westernized African elites who made up the residents of this university faculty housing development. Maybe I know that world too well. I lived in African university faculty housing myself for six years--never in Nigeria, but it doesn't sound all that different from the world I knew. In Adichie's version people drink in each other's living rooms, joke, talk about politics, flirt with (and at sometimes sleep with) each other's spouses, deal with inept houseboys. Yawn!
Then the Igbo genocide and the Biafran War intrude into their lives, with startling suddenness, halfway through the novel, tearing familiar normality apart. From that point on the novel's grim inevitability grows, like a doomed relationship or vise grip around your neck, as the casualties mount, more and more territory falls to "the vandals," and the embargo around Biafra grows tighter and tighter. Living conditions go from bleak to hoffiric. People eat bush rats and crickets to survive--or die of malnutrition. It's not a warm, cuddly read, by any means. It invades your psyche, holds it captive, makes you too live through the scarring, the humiliation, the diminished sense of selfhood that this war brings. No, it's not exactly escapist fiction, but Half of a Yellow Sun is one of the most harrowing accounts I've read yet of civil war in Africa, right up there with Emmanuel Dongala's Johnny Chien Mechant.”

peter b wrote this review Friday, June 20 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“My favorite book by the Nobel Prize winner, although his best known and most influential novel is probably Waiting for the Barbarians. And Disgrace is a terrifc book too. What I love about The Life and Times of Michael K., however, is its simplicity and kindly take on human nature. It reads like a biblical parable, or perhaps a Taoist fable. It's the story of a simple soul who becomes uprooted by the violent unrest of civil strife in an unnamed country and tries to save his aged mother and get her back to the village where she was born. When she dies enroute he is left with no center to his existence, and no identity within an oppressive state apparatus. The story of how he survives by sticking to his instincts and simple existential truths is worthy of Thoreau's Walden. In spite of the grim picture of the cruelty of government authorities in a time of civil emergency, this is a very uplifting story, affirmng the power of simple humanity to triumph. ”

peter b wrote this review Tuesday, June 3 2008. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“My favorite play by Moliere, where a middle-aged lecher, Arnolphe, adopts a beautiful young orphan girl, Agnes, for the sole purpose of raising her up to marry her himself. His plan is to keep her in complete ignorance--or books, society, and certainly sex--so that she'll be too stupid and innocent to cheat on him. Naturally his plans go horribly awry, and naturally she falls in love with someone else--to Arnophe's dismay, for by the time she rejects him he's come to love her himself. Or has he? Is it love or just jealous possessiveness? The great irony of this play is that Moliere himself married a young woman much younger than he, who was something of a protege (the daughter of a woman who had once been his mistress). And when he staged the play he himself played the role of Arnolphe.”

peter b wrote this review Sunday, June 1 2008. ( reply | permalink )