The 1994 Nobelist's most recent novel (after Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, 1995) is a tense meditation on the life of a stricken woman whose sufferings and subsequent transformation linger hauntingly in the memory of the narrator entrusted with her story. That narrator is recognizably Kenzaburo Oe, a famous novelist whose loving and despairing relationship with his mentally retarded son has repeatedly found its way into his books. She is Marie Kuraki, a divorced university teacher whose academic specialty is Flannery O'Connor. O'Connor's own burdened life and complicated religious faith assume new meaning for Marie when a series of catastrophic misfortunes overtake her. The double suicide of her crippled younger son and his brain-damaged older brother, the death of her ex-husband (just as they were planning to reconcile), and Marie's own battle with breast cancer propel her into a close, if argumentative, relationship with the narrator and his family (begun when they both participate in a hunger strike to honor the memory of the Hiroshima dead and protest the proliferation of nuclear weapons). Marie later involves herself with a (somewhat pretentious) theater troupe, and then a zealous commune that removes to America (her affair with a self-styled religious leader nicknamed ``Uncle Sam'' is a bit too nakedly symbolic), and spends her final days in the Mexican countryside, where she is adored as an incarnation of stoicism. Oe's narrator broods compulsively over the enigma of Marie Kuraki's faith (or lack of it), finding parallels for her fate in literary texts (by Balzac, Dante, Yeats, and Dostoevsky, among others). Her enigmatic forbearance evokes for him the great Russian novelist's beleaguered women characters. Though discursiveness dissipates the story's narrative unity, its impassioned intensity keeps you riveted to the page. Not a fully achieved work of fiction, but, still, an impressively dramatic specimen of the contemporary didactic novel, a genre that Oe has elevated by impressing upon it so powerfully his own personal history and sensibility.
Pub Date: May 6, 1996
ISBN: 4-7700-1986-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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