Likely to provoke squirms of embarrassment from readers who may well recall an old adage: never put anything in writing.
A collection of fiery break-up letters written by the rejected.
In the wake of an unpleasant split with her unable-to-commit boyfriend, freelance journalist Holmes decided to put her rage to good use and collect “the best and most famous break-up letters in history.” Hyperbole aside, the collection covers a wide range of letters, real and fictional, from Anne of Cleves’s 1540 note to King Henry VIII regarding their annulment to recklessly fired-off contemporary e-mail messages. The anthology is divided into straightforward sections that are captivating in a Jerry Springer sort of way, such as “The Tell-Off,” “The Other Woman/Other Man,” and “The ‘Dear John’.” Many of the contemporary pieces are remarkable for their deformed eloquence: “You are the spineless little prick of a maggot, eating it’s [sic] way through the shit of a diseased camel which is laying on the dirty, cracked cement floor of a small, poorly run zoo somewhere in small town America.” The compositions frequently clash: an elegantly cool letter by Anne Sexton (“You think you are a gentleman with your effect of polished clothes and mannerisms, but a true gentleman is one that has a kind and humble heart”) rests uneasily near a 51-point rant “from Lola to Ira” (“1. You have B.O. even after a shower”). The concept is slightly distasteful. To be sure, some of the authors wrote their letters with publication in mind, but what of the others? What of the letter Holmes found on the sidewalk and published without locating the writer? While the introduction notes that the break-up letter exists as a separate literary genre with its own rules and language, the text provides no analysis other than the loose chapter classifications. The fictional letters are generally the best written, while the contemporary pieces are notable for their anger and their distinct lack of cleverness and grace.
Likely to provoke squirms of embarrassment from readers who may well recall an old adage: never put anything in writing.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1037-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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