Reading groups in search of spirited discussion would do well to choose this complex and satisfying tale.
An original story of midlife transformation.
Myriam is a woman with a troubled past and an uncertain future. At the age of 43, she decides to open a restaurant. She lies her way into a loan, buys food and fixtures she can’t afford and opens her kitchen to almost certain failure. Just when she’s on the brink of collapse, help arrives in the form of an angelic waiter, the daring decision to offer cheap but good takeaway and to turn her establishment into a gustatory haven for children. This synopsis could be the formula for cheesy commercial fiction, but the story is distinctly cosmopolitan. Myriam, a Parisian, is a beguiling character, and not entirely sympathetic. She’s charming, but part of her charm lies in her prodigious powers of untruth. Desarthe (Good Intentions, 2002, etc.) allows scenes from Myriam’s past to gradually unfold. The heroine is estranged from her husband and son because of an unambiguously bad choice of lovers, but the catalyst for this disastrous relationship was her already broken bond with her child. Desarthe deals with some heavy themes here, but she does so without melodrama, and without asking readers to pity her deeply flawed creation. Myriam has an engaging, sometimes very funny voice, and there are some truly arresting scenes—Myriam bathing in her kitchen’s stainless steel sink among them. The writing is elegant, and the translation contains some Britishisms while also displaying a certain Gallic flair. The happy ending is slightly fantastical, but it’s in keeping with the gently absurdist tone of the novel as a whole.
Reading groups in search of spirited discussion would do well to choose this complex and satisfying tale.Pub Date: April 29, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-14-311323-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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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