Unusual and sophisticated work from a gifted newcomer who has the skills to become an equally promising novelist.
A varied, highly interesting debut collection of ten stories by an award-winning Washington State writer.
Harun’s penchant for taking a bizarre premise and filling it in with persuasive if eccentric details is reminiscent, here and there, of Flannery O’Connor. You can also feel the influence of Shirley Jackson in “The Unseen Ear of God,” a terse fable in which a community exacts a possibly supernatural revenge on sexual predators, and the contours of folklore and myth in “The Fisherman’s Wife,” a ruthlessly compact portrayal of a “haunted” marriage (which ought perhaps to have been developed at greater length) and “The Closed Sea,” a tale of a fishing village’s temptation by the promise of endless abundance that reads like something out of The Arabian Nights. Of the more conventionally realistic stories, two feature the exotic and benign figure of Natife, a Nigerian exchange student whose primeval, earth-centered wisdom contrasts fruitfully with the emotional confusion of a depressed rich girl (in “Lukudi”) and a small boy (in “The King of Limbo”) whose despairing remoteness from his separated parents takes the form of childish fantasies of adventure and heroism. Harun raises domestic drama to impressive heights in a subtly handled portrait of a young woman who loses her newborn baby and thereafter distrusts everyone and fears everything (“Accidents”); a neat little horror story about a saturnine New Jersey woman whose well-meaning husband may have exposed her to the attention of a serial murderer (“The Highwayman”); and “The Eighth Sleeper of Ephesus” (a Nelson Algren Award winner), in which a reclusive widower becomes the pseudonymous “voice” of his hometown (Saltish Bay, a northwestern hamlet where several of these stories are set) raised in opposition to a greedy developer, the victim of a vengeful woman, and, to his amazement, once again his estranged son’s father.
Unusual and sophisticated work from a gifted newcomer who has the skills to become an equally promising novelist.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-193-2
Page Count: 221
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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