Though the overall effect is fragmentary, Zambra’s fragments are consistently witty and provocative. A-minus.
True or false: can effective fiction be written in the format of a standardized test?
Answer: pretty much, and few are as equipped to do it as well as Chilean writer Zambra (My Documents, 2015, etc.), who has a penchant for experimentation. The book is broken up into 90 questions across five sections. At first those questions are largely ironic or comic in simplistic ways. For instance, the reader is asked to name the word that has no relation to “bear”: “endure,” “tolerate,” “abide,” “panda,” or “kangaroo.” But as the test focuses on completing, ordering, and eliminating sentences, it’s clear Zambra is aiming for more sophisticated and poignant effects. The questions become flash-fiction tales about transition points like lost loves, the discovery of a tumor, and a grandfather’s death, and the multiple-choice answers suggest that how we respond to a story depends heavily on where the writer places the narrative stress and what’s omitted or added. (For instance, a first-person story about the successes and failures of his children prompts the reader to rethink the story if lines about grandchildren and planned pregnancies are removed.) This reaches a kind of climax in the “reading comprehension” section, made up of three brief stories about a scheming pair of twins and couples that have split up. The follow-up questions tend to highlight the absurdity of pat answers to works of fiction. (“What is the worst title for this story—the one that would reach the widest possible audience?”) Even so, Zambra can sometimes insistently point to a “correct” answer: for a question in the story about school’s influence, the only option is: “You weren’t educated; you were trained.”
Though the overall effect is fragmentary, Zambra’s fragments are consistently witty and provocative. A-minus.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-310919-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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