A haunting tale.
The uncanny rise of a feminist cult.
Award-winning French Rwandan novelist Mukasonga evokes her country’s tumultuous history in a lyrical, allegorical narrative, translated by Polizzotti, set in the 1930s, when white Catholic missionaries proselytized to a population already steeped in myths. Into the restive Belgian colony a contingent of Black evangelicals arrived from America, “an unknown world,” Rwandans believed, “where the Blacks were as powerful as the Whites.” Central among them was Sister Deborah, whose reputation as a healer excited the community, reaching the mother of Ikirezi, Mukasonga’s narrator. Ikirezi was a sickly child whose ailments, her mother was certain, “came from either people or spirits.” Sister Deborah both healed and inspired Ikirezi; after earning a doctorate in anthropology at Howard University, she became an “eminent Africanist,” returning to her village to investigate the woman who so deeply affected her life. Sister Deborah, Ikirezi discovers, preached liberation: a celestial woman would descend on a cloud, scattering “a marvelous seed that would yield abundant harvests without the need for farming, thereby ending the servitude in which women were mired.” In preparation for this great coming, women must carry out a revolutionary plan: “uprooting the cursed coffee plants, chasing away the agronomists with their stupid boots, scattering the medallions of the tax collectors and missionaries.” Fearing the spread of a rebellious cult, the army intervened. Chaos ensued, and Sister Deborah may or may not have been killed, may or may not have reinvented herself as Mama Nganga, and may or may not have finally been burned to death in a fiery rout. Ikirezi’s fate, too, is unsettled: Told she will give birth to the Messiah, she flees Rwanda, knowing in her heart that “spirits never come when you expect them.”
A haunting tale.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781953861948
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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