Blending a realistic portrait of a marriage with a symbolic setting brings mixed results, but this novel still has plenty of...
Spanish novelist and film director Loriga (Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore, 2004, etc.) traces the fortunes of a married couple progressing through an increasingly dystopian landscape.
Some dystopian fiction abounds with specifics, the better to comment on the present moment. Loriga’s novel—his third to appear in the U.S.—takes a more ambiguous and archetypal route. The narrator and his wife have been married a long time—long enough, at least, to have two sons old enough to be fighting in a war where they may or may not have been killed. When the novel begins, a silent child has been living with the couple for six months. “He was wounded when he arrived, which was part of why we started caring for him,” the narrator writes. The boy’s silence hangs over the book: Like the fate of the couple’s children, it’s unclear if it denotes something sinister or is a pause before a return to normalcy. Loriga balances granular details, such as the class differences between the husband and wife, with more ambiguous elements. The novel takes a shift into a more overtly science-fictional mode when the couple and their young charge are forced to move to a city—one where the buildings are transparent and privacy is a thing of the past. There are hints here of the government’s potential for repressive violence and something unsettling happening with the regulation of hygiene, but, largely, life goes on. The narrator finds a job and settles into a routine, and it’s only after time passes that he begins to realize that things are very wrong in both this society and his marriage. At times the book's subtlety feels too restrained, but its climax packs abundant weight.
Blending a realistic portrait of a marriage with a symbolic setting brings mixed results, but this novel still has plenty of power.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-52852-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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