A sterile account of parallel lives.
This so-called mathematical novel from the Chinese-American poet and novelist (A Chinaman's Chance, 2011, etc.) is meta-fiction that tracks two linked characters.
Call them alter egos, call them doppelgängers, or simply call them by their names: G and Ge. G is a Chinese-American man in the U.S.; Ge is a Chinese woman in mainland China. Both are pursuing careers involving finite numbers. How many degrees separate them is a question best left to mathematicians. The key point is that neither cuts the umbilical cord to their creator, or knows the joy of autonomy. When we meet them in 1968, they are young teachers. G is at a small state university in Oshkosh, Wis.; Ge is also a university teacher, changing cities to avoid the state-sanctioned Red Guards, destructive hooligans still in their teens. Ferment in China, ferment in America. G is approached by the Black Student Union; he agrees to be their faculty advisor. There is a brief disturbance in the President’s office; over 100 students are arrested. The last straw comes for G when his department supports the administration; he quits teaching the same time Ge quits, strangers acting in concert. G moves to Pittsburgh to work for Westinghouse, while Ge’s hired by a state planning office, her focus is sedimentation caused by the Three Gorges Project. Dams in China, dams in America, as seen by two mathematicians with a shared social conscience. Ge concludes Three Gorges represents “vanity and greed”; G obsesses about the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington, “that has turned the environment…to shit.” The mathematical novel merges with the hydrodynamics novel. There is no plot, but there is a point of view, a humanist aversion to the arrogance of power, whether implemented by corporations or the state. The meta-fictional quirks, when the veil separating author and reader disappears, don’t amount to much. The novel ends with G and Ge working on papers with identical titles for an international conference on numbers.
A sterile account of parallel lives.Pub Date: June 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-988-19195-6-4
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Haven Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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