Consuming Desires<Product> <Article-Title>Still Waters in Niger
Consumingdesires seems too much, or out of place. Quiet by Anne McClintock epiphanies rise from the story like the bones that keep rising to the surface in in IL:Triquarterly Books, 1999,216 pp., Still Waters Niger, by KathleenHill. Evanston, the novel: "there they are, bathed in the $24.95 hardcover. clean light of the sun, careless, tossing aside the sand that streams from their FAMINE IS A GEOGRAPHY of haunted cise meditations on motherhood. Under bland and perfect stare." places. In Kathleen Hill's luminous the mother's fever ran a deeper dread. Vivid details emerge as forcefully as novel about hunger, Still Waters in "Sickness is one thing, but suppose the more tumultous events might arrive in a Niger, the heart too is a haunted and hun- mother is perfectly well." Suppose she is different novel, evoking a world of com- gry place. simply too distractedby her own hungers plicated density and joy: women with How many of us could find on a world to attend to the children pressing at the "legs thin as herons"; a lizard "with an map the sunstruck city of Zinder, lashed door? The narratoris haunted by the fear orange head rigid in the sun";the glass of by sand and beset by famine in West Af- that she may never be able to slake her water ringed with flies. The spareness of rican Niger? But for the Irish-American child's thirst or appease her hunger. the plot becomes itself the plot: the nar- narrator of Hill's exquisitely crafted Nowhere before have I read such an rator's dawning discovery that the place, novel, it was there, in Zinder, "floating unsparing meditation on the inadmissi- Kathleen Hill Zinder, which she "had thought com- the seeds of life and death indifferently," ble: that motherhood does not come monplace, even undesirable, has become that desire fastened.
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