A novel with an epic feel, even at 320 pages, building a complex, character-based story that stretches over generations.
Pensive novel of desperate lives in colonial East Africa by 2021 Nobel Prize–winning writer Gurnah.
Where is Ilyas Hassan? That’s the central question that runs through Tanzanian British author Gurnah’s new novel, one that occupies its four principal characters. The oldest is Khalifa, who “did not look Indian, or not the kind of Indian they were used to seeing in that part of the world,” the product of an African mother and Gujarati father. Khalifa is but one of many Gujarati settlers around Zanzibar, territory taken by Germany in the “Scramble for Africa.” The Germans are not kind: By their lights, they “had to make the Africans feel the clenched fist of German power in order that they should learn to bear the yoke of their servitude compliantly.” Ilyas, a young migrant, is pressed into service in the schutztruppe, the colonial army, sent off to fight against first native peoples and then, as World War I erupts, the British. A younger man named Hamza also enlists, “silently wretched about what he had done.” Brutalized by a German officer in his unit, Hamza deserts and returns home and finds work in the same commercial enterprise as Ilyas and Khalifa, who has married a woman who is convinced that she is “surrounded by blasphemers,” a pious holy terror who reveals hidden depths. Gurnah’s story is an understated study in personality; the action is sparing, the reaction nuanced and wholly believable, and the love story that develops between Hamza and a young woman named Afiya touching: “ ‘I have nothing,’ he said. ‘Nor do I,’ she said. ‘We’ll have nothing together.’ ” The denouement, too, is unexpected, the story drawn to a close by two Ilyases: the original and Hamza’s son, who bears his name. Gurnah’s novel pairs well with Cameroon writer Patrice Nganang’s novel A Trail of Crab Tracks as a document of the colonial experience, and it is impeccably written.
A novel with an epic feel, even at 320 pages, building a complex, character-based story that stretches over generations.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59354-1-883
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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