Very smart, very moving and occasionally very funny.
A revelation for all who follow the controversial French novelist, whether they love or loathe him.
Houellebecq is “a loner with strong misanthropic tendencies,” “a tired old decadent” and a “tortured wreck, "who “stank a little, but less than a corpse.” At least these are descriptions of a character called “Michel Houellebecq” in the latest novel by the author who shares that name (Platform, 2003, etc.), though the narrative might well inspire readers to temper that caricature of the “real” Houellebecq. Where the novelist has been accused of trafficking in themes such as sex tourism and moral nihilism for shock value, here he achieves a richness and resonance beyond previous work, while continuing to explore free-market economics and how they pertain to artistic value and moral value. The character who shares his name even “seemed happy,” shockingly enough, though he keeps his emotional distance from the author, much as he has from readers. Instead, the novel gets deeper beneath the skin of its protagonist, the visual artist Jed Martin, whose career it chronicles from his years as a photographer, whose enlargement of Michelin maps, combined with images from the places mapped, inspire an exhibition titled “THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY.” Martin then switches to painting, woodshedding for a decade, emerging with the “Series of Simple Professions,” hailed for masterworks such as “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology” (having destroyed another titled “Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market." Somehow, the novel’s fictional biography encompasses a tender romance, a meditation on the function and value of art and a police procedural. Both loners, the painter and the novelist, whom Martin commissions to write catalogue copy and whose portrait he paints, feel some affinity for each other, as they suspect that they might be kindred spirits, or even become friends. What they most share, it seems, is “something that did not exist in H Houellebecq, nor in him: a sort of familiarity with life.”
Very smart, very moving and occasionally very funny.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-70155-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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