A tender-hearted account, winning in its simplicity, of a childhood infected too soon by the darkness of adults.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, this intriguing debut by a Libyan expatriate spotlights a Libyan family buffeted by a repressive regime.
The Qaddafi dictatorship is seen through the eyes of an only child, nine-year-old Suleiman. He lives with his Mama and Baba (father) in Tripoli; the year is 1979. Baba has international business interests; while he’s traveling, Mama becomes “ill” and takes her “medicine” (alcohol provided, illegally, by the baker). It’s not the happiest of marriages. It was arranged by her family after she was seen with a boy at a coffeehouse. She was only 14 and Baba a total stranger on that “black day” they wed. Her plight weighs heavily on Suleiman, but soon he will have more to worry about. Their neighbor Ustath Rashid, a university teacher and father of his best friend Kareem, is taken away by government agents on suspicion of betraying the regime; Mama, opposed to political activism, now shuns her neighbors and Suleiman, hating himself, breaks with Kareem. Baba is the regime’s next target; frantically, Mama burns all his beloved books. Matar precisely captures Suleiman’s bewilderment as his world falls apart. He’s afraid of the goon parked outside their door, but like the other kids is attracted to the power that radiates from another neighbor, Jafer, a top security official. Mama, practicing “the dark art of submission,” appeals to Jafer to save Baba. Her entreaties work. Baba is returned home, beaten up but with no broken bones. Their erstwhile neighbor is less fortunate. In the novel’s most riveting scene, he is hanged in front of a cheering crowd, a TV spectacular. So, state terror is now added to the Koran and the tales of Scheherazade as one of Suleiman’s formative influences. Some loose ends and a rushed postscript showing Suleiman’s later life in Cairo are minor problems.
A tender-hearted account, winning in its simplicity, of a childhood infected too soon by the darkness of adults.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-34042-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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