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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
"Zinder was a case, always, of unrequited love," according to the unnamed narrator of Kathleen Hill's Still Waters in Niger. Together with her husband and three small children, she once lived in this forbidding West African town, a "city of winds and wheeling vultures, of rocks shimmering in the heat." Yet in the end, its strangeness only made it more precious, and the place became her consuming passion. As the novel opens, the narrator has returned to Niger to visit her eldest daughter, Zara, who works in a medical clinic not far from Zinder. With Zara she retraces the scenes of her young motherhood, searching for the same transcendence she found there 17 years ago. Once again, she longs to become a woman freed from the confines of her own history:
From Publishers Weekly
The unnamed, Irish-American narrator of Hill's transporting, semi-autobiographical first novel returns, after 17 years, to the searing heat of West Africa and the quiet sound of children murmuring thanks to Allah when a coin is dropped in their open palms. She comes to visit her grown daughter, Zara, who works in a medical clinic in Matameye, Nigeria, near the town Zara had lived in as a child. Alone together for a month (the narrator has left her academic husband behind in New York), mother and daughter reconstruct the strange years they spent as expatriates there and reconcile their changing roles. With a poet's odd precision, Hill resurrects the myth of Demeter and Persephone to help her describe the pathos attached to a child's coming of age and inevitable abandonment of the parent. In the narrator's version, Persephone is swallowed up and Demeter left to stare at "a field of asphodel, stupid beneath the sun," and listen to the "long wink of silence." The narrator's profound, unflashy observations about motherhood, the necessities and extravagances of survival, the effect of travel and dislocation and the peculiar beauty of the drought-struck land are the work of a brilliant essayist. Hill avoids both overexplaining and overexclaiming, and subtly flavors her story with words of the native Hausa language as well as the French of the colonists. Evocative dreams and disturbing memories, superimposed on the narrator's present experience, make a patchwork travelogue similar in effect to Ondaatje's Running in the Family. This is not a novel in the traditional sense, and may frustrate readers with its oneiric refusal to be literal, but it is nonetheless an exquisite piece of writing.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
"Zinder was a case, always, of unrequited love," according to the unnamed narrator of Kathleen Hill's Still Waters in Niger. Together with her husband and three small children, she once lived in this forbidding West African town, a "city of winds and wheeling vultures, of rocks shimmering in the heat." Yet in the end, its strangeness only made it more precious, and the place became her consuming passion. As the novel opens, the narrator has returned to Niger to visit her eldest daughter, Zara, who works in a medical clinic not far from Zinder. With Zara she retraces the scenes of her young motherhood, searching for the same transcendence she found there 17 years ago. Once again, she longs to become a woman freed from the confines of her own history:
This time, if no other, myth will overtake one's own stumbling story and all the griefs and longings spilled so messily over the sad confusion of one's days will at last assume a noble shape, both tragic and anonymous: Orpheus, unable to resist the backward glance. Demeter, crying for her daughterMyth does suffuse this story, but not in the way the narrator envisions. As she meets the Hausa women in Zara's clinic, her story becomes a meditation on motherhood, hunger, shame, and love--both universal and specific, metaphorical and concrete. She moves from the clinic's malnourished babies to her own starving Irish ancestors, from her guilt as a mother to her grief as a daughter. In less sure hands, so much abstraction could easily become too much for one slight, plotless novel to bear. But Hill writes like a dream, and her Zinder is both lyrical and precisely observed. Still Waters in Niger is a lovely, satisfying book, as vivid and compressed as a poem. --Mary Park
From Publishers Weekly
The unnamed, Irish-American narrator of Hill's transporting, semi-autobiographical first novel returns, after 17 years, to the searing heat of West Africa and the quiet sound of children murmuring thanks to Allah when a coin is dropped in their open palms. She comes to visit her grown daughter, Zara, who works in a medical clinic in Matameye, Nigeria, near the town Zara had lived in as a child. Alone together for a month (the narrator has left her academic husband behind in New York), mother and daughter reconstruct the strange years they spent as expatriates there and reconcile their changing roles. With a poet's odd precision, Hill resurrects the myth of Demeter and Persephone to help her describe the pathos attached to a child's coming of age and inevitable abandonment of the parent. In the narrator's version, Persephone is swallowed up and Demeter left to stare at "a field of asphodel, stupid beneath the sun," and listen to the "long wink of silence." The narrator's profound, unflashy observations about motherhood, the necessities and extravagances of survival, the effect of travel and dislocation and the peculiar beauty of the drought-struck land are the work of a brilliant essayist. Hill avoids both overexplaining and overexclaiming, and subtly flavors her story with words of the native Hausa language as well as the French of the colonists. Evocative dreams and disturbing memories, superimposed on the narrator's present experience, make a patchwork travelogue similar in effect to Ondaatje's Running in the Family. This is not a novel in the traditional sense, and may frustrate readers with its oneiric refusal to be literal, but it is nonetheless an exquisite piece of writing.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
See all Editorial Reviews
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