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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Stunningly Horrific War Story Told by a Child Soldier,
By
This review is from: Beasts of No Nation: A Novel (Hardcover)
A young boy named Strika pulls another young boy named Agu out of his hiding place and into the middle of a senseless civil war in an unnamed African country. Agu is dragged before the Commandant, the ruthless leader of a troop of soldiers, and given a choice: join or die on the spot. It is a devil's bargain, since the price of Agu's joining and saving his own life is to hack another person to death with a machete. "I am not a bad boy," Agu reasons to himself (in so many words) over the killing. "I am a soldier now, and soldiers kill, so I am only doing a soldier's job and not being a bad boy."Uzodinma Iweala's stunning first novel tells the story of Agu's indoctrination into an adult world of civil warfare, a world of fear and hardship and stomach-churning violence. More significant, Agu enters a world of loss - separation and possibly death of his family, loss of his faith, and loss of his childlike (and sexual) innocence. If he survives the war, regardless of its outcome, he is clearly scarred for life psychologically as well as physically. Two aspects of BEASTS OF NO NATION contribute to its narrative power. The first is Iweala's ability to convey a sense of blind irrationality. He gives us no sense of what country we are reading about, we have no idea who the competing factions are or what they are fighting for (or against) -- we don't even know into which side Agu has been conscripted. At the same time, Iweala offers no plan of attack, no pattern to the Commandant's movements, and no military objective being sought. The Commandant and his troop are little better than the scurrying ants to which Agu constantly refers, skittering about the countryside pillaging and destroying whatever they find and otherwise simply fighting the enemy and their hunger and fear to stay alive. The second source of narrative power derives from the author's choice of narrator and narrative style. The entire story is rendered through Agu's eyes and voice. We see the civil war through a child's uncomprehending eyes and we are as confused about the issues and reasons for killing as he is. We hear the story in Agu's voice, a mixture of childlike innocence and a broken, pidgin English that makes us see events and feel emotions through a child's limited vocabulary and his struggles to articulate the utter senselessness of what he is witnessing. This language may grate for some or seem like a novelistic contrivance (after all, assuming Agu really thinks and speaks in his native tongue, why must we see it translated in such mangled English from a boy who appeared to be moderately well-educated?). It is also fraught with the writerly complication of having a semi-articulate narrator who somehow has enough command of the language to summon up words like camouflage, crater, masquerade, junction, verandah, catarrh, vomit, and insubordination. In the end, despite the inhuman violence and sexual degradation he has experienced, Agu claims for himself the mantle of humanity. "I am having mother once," he asserts, "and she is loving me." This is a marvelous short novel and a deeply disturbing look at genocidal civil war through the eyes of one of its innocent young victims.
45 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Harrowing but not Special,
By A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Beasts of No Nation: A Novel (Hardcover)
Titled after the classic Fela Kuti album, this debut novella from the son of Nigerian immigrants tackles the horror of child soldiers with mixed results. In an anonymous West African country torn apart by civil war, a young boy named Agu is dragged from his hiding place by rebels destroying a village and given the traditional choice: Join or die. In the harrowing scene, his initiation into the rebel forces involves killing a screaming man with a machete. In psychological self-protective logic rather unlikely for a young boy, he tells himself that since he is now a soldier, he is only doing his job by killing. Agu has no clue what the civil war is about or what constitutes an enemy, he is simply another weapon in the hands of the charismatic brutal leaders, pointed toward the enemy and told to kill. Of course, when humanity is degraded to the point children are forced into soldiering, the reasons why aren't really of any relevance, and Iweala is wise to avoid trying to explain the context for Agu's nightmare. Instead, the dislocation of his kidnapping is felt all the more, as his rebel unit wanders around, apparently aimlessly, often on the brink of starvation. Agu's experience is awful and certain scenes are moving, but it is somewhat lacking in drama or tension. There's a certain roteness to the story: gentle child (check), sexual abuse (check), flashbacks to better times (check), carnage (check), caring Western aid worker (check), triumph of the human spirit (check). Agu narrates his tale in a kind of pidgin English that will either enchant or enervate the reader -- I found it exceedingly tiresome, inconsistent, and artificial. It is tragic that child soldiers exist, however to truly move the reader, fiction has to work a little harder than this does. It's not a bad book, just not great, and not even the best novel about child soldiers this year. That would be either Johnny Mad Dog by the Congolese writer Emannuel Dongala or Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley, the daughter of Sierra Leonians. Another worth checking out is Peter Dickinson's 1990 Whitbread-winning novel, AK.
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
the power of the story over the style of the storytelling,
By
This review is from: Beasts of No Nation: A Novel (Hardcover)
By the time Beasts of No Nation was published it was the subject of mass critical acclaim. I had read reviews that had nothing but good things to say about the novel that that it was an important work by a new author. Because it is a novel set in Africa the first association is automatically Achebe, because any African set novel written by an African will always be compared to Achebe. Beasts of No Nation was called a very strong debut. I'm of two minds. The first mind is totally and completely impressed by Iweala's work here. He has written a brief novel with very raw power about something we in America almost never read about in fiction or non-fiction: How is it that a young man or even a boy would join one of these militia's in Africa and go on killing rampages and act as a private army? What drives these men to do such barbaric things? Beasts of No Nation gives us one possible answer and as brutal as the militias are to the commonly perceived victims, the brutality extends to the militia itself. There is a veneer of a haven that the militia extends, but it is tenuous at best and Uzodinma Iweala shows all sides of the brutality where the humanity is stretched as thin as it could possibly be and still call itself human.My other mind is far less impressed by the actual craft of writing employed in this novel. The book reads as if it were written in the voice of an African who does not speak English very well and so is stating things in a broken English that feels appropriate to the character and the story, but is also distracting. Because the author is a Harvard graduate with honors for his writing, I choose to believe that the style of the novel is a conscious choice rather than his own broken English. It is fully appropriate on one hand, but on the other it is very distracting and pulls me, as a reader, out of the story. I would hate to suggest to an author to not use dialect because many very fine books use dialect to great effect. In the case of Beasts of No Nation I felt the story was weakened by the overuse of dialect. Beasts of No Nation is, at the surface, a novel about a young man who is quite intelligent and wants nothing more than to learn and go to school. Life does not quite go the way he would like when war comes to his country and militias start forming and roaming around attacking anyone who gets in their way. Our protagonist gets involved in one such militia, but not because he believes in its cause. His involvement is completely selfish: it is to save his own life. Thus begins the examination of these roaming militias and the damage they cause to the people they come in contact to as well the people who comprise the militias. If I consider Beasts of No Nation in terms of the story it is telling I will quite willingly admit that it is superior. The raw power and pain contained within the 140 pages is very real and it is a case of the story far overshadowing the storytelling. It is the execution of the storytelling that I find fault with. Iweala has written a very powerful novel, there is no question about that. But the overuse of dialect was so distracting to me that I feel just a little bit of pulling back on the dialect would elevate this novel quite a bit. Rather than simply portraying the protagonist as an intelligent and thoughtful young man who has not had nearly as much eduction as he deserves and speaks in broken sentences, it rather feels like Iweala is the one who is lacking. I do not mean this as a personal attack because I know Iweala is a Harvard graduate and thus quite intelligent and skilled. Considering that the protagonist would not be speaking or narrating in English during this novel, there is no reason why his thoughts wouldn't translate into full and well crafted sentences like I am positive Iweala can write given the collegiate awards he has won. So, Beasts of No Nation is a novel where the story rises above the manner in which it is told. It is worth reading and Uzodimna Iweala surely has a fine career with excellent novels ahead of him, but I hope that years down the line this will be viewed as a worthy first novel and not the best he was able to produce. -Joe Sherry
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