Lushly evoked island atmosphere and cadenced language as circuitous as a Pascal family fight make for an impressive first...
San Francisco lawyer returns to her ancestral Caribbean island to sort out a family real-estate wrangle.
Silva’s debut documents the myriad ways in which a prickly, unforgiving family can nevertheless ensnare would-be escapees, miring them in repression and dysfunction on a fictional Caribbean island, Baobique. Jean Sousa is the American-born daughter of Sophie, who married her white teacher and fled to the United States. After desertion by two men, Sophie, who suffers from a depressive addiction to sleep, is back on her Baobique estate, Godwyn, owned jointly with her mother, Granny Pascal. The Pascals are a prominent political family, rivals of the Hills for control of the island. Summoned to Baobique because Sophie’s brother, former Chief Minister George Pascal, is dying of cancer, Jean meets Susan Hill, niece of the former Prime Minister. When Jean’s Uncle Martin spies the two young women making love, Uncle George banishes Jean from the island, which has a strictly enforced anti-homosexuality criminal code. Shortly after George’s death, Sophie enlists Jean’s help: Granny is threatening to add Sophie’s two surviving brothers to the deed of Godwyn, thereby ensuring future sibling warfare. Jean is in the middle of her first major law-reform case, a custody dispute between lesbian parents. Reluctantly, to get her mother off her futon, she accompanies her home, where she encounters Susan and effects a rapprochement, complicated by the fact that Jean ignored Susan’s letters and that Susan, now a physician on Baobique, has a boyfriend with a bright political future. Granny dies, leaving Godwyn’s title as is, but the uncles still claim some inchoate entitlement. Legally, Sophie now owns Godwyn outright, but Jean placates the uncles by negotiating an easement to a family graveyard on the premises. Meanwhile, Jean’s client and her ex, reunited by a lesbian-bashing incident, have seemingly settled their differences.
Lushly evoked island atmosphere and cadenced language as circuitous as a Pascal family fight make for an impressive first novel, despite disjointed narration and remarkably tame conflicts.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-933354-11-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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