A fleeting story translated with care—worth savoring.
So often, we don’t miss the things we love until we’re sure they’re gone for good—that’s part of the lesson in this elegant, all-too-brief novella from prize-winning Chilean novelist and poet Zambra (Bonsai, 2008).
This Möbius strip of a story examines a single night in the life of Julián, a writer and professor, who is tending to his stepdaughter Daniela while they both wait for absent wife and mother Verónica to come home from her art class. Julián, younger but uglier than Daniela’s father Fernando, doesn’t seem like the jealous type and occupies the idling hours by telling his charge the titular story, a rambling, extemporaneous tale about the vegetable denizens of a nearby jungle. As the hours tick by, Julián’s imagination gets the best of him. “To keep calm, Julián thinks that literature and the world are full of women who don’t come home, of women who die in brutal accidents, but at least in the world, in life, there are also women to, unforeseeably, have to take a friend to the hospital, or who have a flat tire in the middle of the avenue and nobody stops to help,” Zambra writes. The novel is short, but its author pours caution and tension into every line like the poet he is. The more time that passes in this long evening, the further away Julián’s mind wanders, imagining the life that Daniela will have as a popular psychologist, dreaming of the day that she reads his unfinished novel. “Julian is a blot that is erased and goes away. Verónica is a blot that is erased and remains. The future is Daniela’s story,” we learn. By the time Zambra brings readers to the precipice of his ambiguous ending, we’re left asking the same question that Julián is forced to ask himself: When does the future begin?
A fleeting story translated with care—worth savoring.Pub Date: July 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934824-24-5
Page Count: 148
Publisher: KCP Fiction/Kids Can
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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