A truly disturbing work that offers a rare insight into the making of a zealot. Khadra (In the Name of God, not reviewed) is...
A taut and harrowing account of a young Algerian actor caught up in the political strife of the 1990s who joins a commando of Islamic guerillas.
Why, some ask these days, would anyone want to roll back centuries of secular progress in the name of theocracy and religious war? Most Muslims, though, see the question in more elemental terms. Young Nafa Walid, for example, simply got fed up with the corruption of the secular authorities in his native Algeria. A small-time film actor who never got his big break, Nafa worked as the chauffeur for a rich Algerian family whose members alternately insulted and pampered him—and eventually asked him to cover up a murder. Disgusted, Nafa left them and tried to find peace by returning to Islam. At the mosque, he became acquainted with members of an underground movement called the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which sought to overthrow Algeria’s ruling National Liberation Front (FLN) in order to establish an Islamic government. Hesitant about becoming involved, Nafa agrees to drive a taxi owned by the FIS but tries to keep clear of political entanglements. He later agrees to be a courier, and later still (after his father is murdered by FLN police) joins the maquis (underground guerillas) and takes part in assassinations and kidnappings. An innocent but not a dupe, Nafa comes to his radicalism gradually, and the great virtue of Khadra’s account is that it makes Nafa’s descent into partisan violence fully credible and even largely sympathetic. The ending is predictable, of course, but the author depicts it with the same power and tension that informs the rest of the story.
A truly disturbing work that offers a rare insight into the making of a zealot. Khadra (In the Name of God, not reviewed) is the pseudonym of Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former officer in the Algerian army.Pub Date: June 30, 2003
ISBN: 1-902881-75-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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