The depiction of digitally crunched life, however valid, is overdone, the author’s purpose elusive.
From the author of Einstein’s Dreams (1993), a haunting if ultimately unsatisfying metafiction.
Bill Chalmers is an eager and, as far as he knows, happy participant in what was once quaintly called the rat race but now, with the infusion of information—from cell phones, computers, etc.—is called the New Economy. One morning on the way to work in downtown Boston, Chalmers literally loses himself: he suddenly has no idea where he’s going or what he does. (His business, as it’s intended to be, is a bit murky, having to do with the receipt, handling, and transmission of information, and the imputation to it of life and death qualities.) Struck by his amnesia, Chalmers is virtually naked on the floor of the subway, curled in the fetal position around his cell phone. Arrested and hospitalized, treated by a pair of overzealous doctors, Chalmers endures a series of tests—something is wrong with his eyes, there’s an anomaly with his brain—and an unauthorized bit of treatment with a new instrument that goes unexplained. His memory restored, after a fashion, and the oddness in his eyes gone, the only immediate remnant of what his family and friends refer to as his “mugging” is a scar on his head and a numbness at his extremities. At the insistence of his wife, he seeks out the eponymous diagnosis. Meanwhile, his own story is paralleled with that of Anytus, the ancient Greek politician partly responsible for the execution of Socrates, a character whom Chalmers’s adolescent son Alex comes upon through an on-line university course he’s pirated. Although comparisons are drawn between Chalmers and Socrates (the numbness of Chalmers’s limbs and the effect of the hemlock on Socrates’; the imprisonment of Socrates in jail and of Chalmers in his body), the metaphor never quite gels.
The depiction of digitally crunched life, however valid, is overdone, the author’s purpose elusive.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-43615-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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
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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