Popescu tries hard to give voice to the needs and wants of a girl from a marginalized community but falls short of his...
Journalist Popescu’s debut novel tells the story of a teenage girl from the Sherpa community coming-of-age in the Himalayas.
The novel begins two days before 17-year-old narrator Nima's wedding day, about three years after a tragedy befell her family, which includes her abusive father, compliant mother, and five younger sisters. When the groom-to-be, Norbu, seeks to alter an important detail of the arrangement, the prospect of the marriage becomes untenable, and Nima must flee. Few opportunities exist for married women in Nima’s community, let alone young, single ones, but a determined Nima commits to supporting herself the way her father once supported the family and Norbu would his, by trekking to Mount Everest’s base camp, initially disguised as a boy, and then as the girl she is. She encounters a trio of Westerners—Val, a reporter for the BBC, Val’s boyfriend, Ethan, and their photographer friend Daniel—that hires her as one of two guides. (Popescu has himself climbed partway up Everest as a reporter for the BBC.) Between the hostile terrain and even more hostile culture toward women and girls, the journey proves perilous. The novel is at its best when it’s grounded in Nima’s spiritual upbringing even though she herself doesn’t necessarily believe what her parents do. But too often, Nima is explaining her culture and the worldview that alienates her so deeply to the reader. The novel’s structure, language, and characters, most of which do not move beyond archetypes, do little to enrich the story. Nima faces many compelling challenges, but a series of hardships, even when rooted in intersecting oppressive circumstances, do not a novel make.
Popescu tries hard to give voice to the needs and wants of a girl from a marginalized community but falls short of his literary aspirations.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-944700-85-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Unnamed Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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