Khemiri adds a distinctive and quirky voice—actually several of them—to contemporary literature.
A distinguished, linguistically complex narrative that examines the ordeals of a Tunisian immigrant to Sweden.
Swedish author Khemiri focuses on issues of racism and adjustment to a new life in the putatively progressive atmosphere of Sweden. The narrative structure is both amusing and multilayered, for one of the narrators is named Khemiri, who like the author is the son of a Tunisian immigrant. Another narrative aspect of the novel involves a hilarious commentary on the story of this immigrant, Abbas Khemiri, by his supposed best friend Kadir, who protests mightily against the son’s hostility toward his father. Kadir writes in a fractured English (or Swedish in the original) that the translator has captured brilliantly. Jonas, the estranged son (not to be too confused with the author), is alienated from his father’s affection and chronicles the downfall of this relationship with keen and sensitive observations. On moving from Tunisia to Stockholm, the father sets up a business of photographing pets, but to try to “pass” in Swedish society he changes his name to Krister Holmström. His embittered son considers his father a “Swediot” for even trying to blend in with Scandinavian society, and Kadir desperately tries to rescue Abbas’ reputation—not a particularly easy task, especially when Abbas eventually moves back to Tunisia and becomes a photographer of Tunisian exoticism, convincing women to pose for the “humoristically erotic” Aladdin and His Magic Tramp and 1,000 and One Tights, a shoot in which Mr. Bedouin, the character they make up to compete with Mr. Bean, “is welcomed extra generously in an oasis by seven sex-starved Saudi aerobics instructors.” While the novel is at times genuinely amusing, it also explores serious themes of cultural homogeneity, as Abbas eventually feels his son has become “nothing”—neither Tunisian nor Swedish.
Khemiri adds a distinctive and quirky voice—actually several of them—to contemporary literature.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-27095-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
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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