Honestly earned echoes of A Passage to India, in an ambitious, gorgeously written near-miss.
The lives of two restless women separated both by a century and from all they love most are explored in replete parallel narratives—in this Booker-nominated third novel from the Egyptian-born British author (In the Eye of the Sun, 1993, etc.).
In 1901, Englishwoman Anna Winterbourne, living in British-occupied Cairo, is left alone when her husband in essence dies of depression and despair over his country’s arrogant cruelty toward this newest jewel in its crown. Determined to penetrate to the heart of Egypt’s patient, seductive mysteries, Anna ends up a captive in the home of prominent attorney and political figure Sharif Pasha al-Baroudi, who will become her second husband. The story of their arduous effort to blend in their own union the best of their two warring cultures is uncovered in the late 1990s by Anna’s great-granddaughter Isabel Parkman, a journalist who’s researching Egyptian concepts of, and attitudes toward, the approaching millennium. Isabel’s life imitates Anna’s to the extent that she too is in love with a native Egyptian: volatile symphony conductor, writer, and political activist Omar, who has fathered her child—perhaps with the aid of a talisman: a piece of a tapestry woven by Anna, depicting the fertility myth of Isis and Osiris. Much of this complex and exotic material is as engrossing as it is instructive, though Isabel’s gradual understanding of the world through which her ancestor hopefully moved (and by which she was eventually, brutally bereft and rejected) is too often conveyed in virtual lectures offered by Isabel’s researcher and mentor Amal—who is, in another parallelism that seems altogether too forced, the great-granddaughter of Anna’s companion and soulmate, her Egyptian sister-in-law Layla. Conversely, the Anna Winterbourne plot is often stunningly dramatic: Soueif makes us believe in this passionate exile’s deep identification with her embattled host country and genuine love for the man who embodies it for her.
Honestly earned echoes of A Passage to India, in an ambitious, gorgeously written near-miss.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-72011-4
Page Count: 529
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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