Kerrigan’s unresolved angst is the artificial heart of this real, joyous celebration of Copenhagen.
A sui generis work, the third in the author’s Copenhagen Quartet, following In the Company of Angels (2010) and Falling Sideways (2011); these stand-alone novels have nothing in common save their Copenhagen setting.
Though the viewpoint character Kerrigan is not Kennedy’s alter ego, they overlap. Both are Irish-American expatriate writers, long resident in the Danish capital. Kerrigan’s current commissioned project is to sample Copenhagen’s bars (there are over 1,500) and write up the best 100; for the research, he has an associate, a woman in her late 50s, like himself. The bars they visit are itemized in boldface, guidebook style. It’s a hopefully never-ending project for Kerrigan, a serious drinker and a lover of Copenhagen (the novel is subtitled “a love story”). That love expands to pay tribute to the city’s history and its literary giants (Kierkegaard, Hans Christian Andersen). Coiled in this thicket of names, among the dates he rattles off like an auctioneer, is the story of Kerrigan’s devastating loss. He was lecturing at the university on verisimilitude, the writer’s creation of illusion, when a student transfixed him. Blonde, blue-eyed Licia was 20 years his junior but appeared equally attracted. They married, had a baby. Then, pregnant again, Licia disappeared with their daughter. Divorce papers followed. That was three years ago; the wound is still raw. What festers most is her accusation: “You are so blind.” Kerrigan is haunted by the irony that he, an authority on illusion, had been blinded by the illusion of love. All this he confesses to his associate, after bedding her; but, still in turmoil, he takes a quick trip to Dublin, meditating on Joyce. This attempt “to clothe himself in history and literature” doesn’t work, and a solo pub-crawl back in Copenhagen almost does him in. It’s 1999, fin de siècle, and maybe fin de Kerrigan, for the doctor has discovered clotting in both lungs.
Kerrigan’s unresolved angst is the artificial heart of this real, joyous celebration of Copenhagen.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-109-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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