A lovely collection of stories that rewards subsequent readings.
Jamaican immigrant and return-migration stories told with unsentimental honesty.
Eleven short stories examine the immigrant experience through the prism of place, food, gender, and generations; in this collection, the home lands are Jamaica—where the author spent her childhood—and the United States. Far from pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstrap mythology, and thankfully devoid of violin-swelling nostalgia, these stories unravel the knot of being in a place but not quite belonging and the sense of missing but not quite understanding what was lost. In “Bad Behavior” (winner of the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction), what could have been written as a contest of wills turns out instead to be an examination of three generations of women in a Jamaican family. The “bad behavior” belongs to the youngest, 14-year-old Stacy, who was caught giving a boy a blow job in school. Delivering Stacy to her granny Trudy in Jamaica, Pam, the girl’s frantic mother, hopes Trudy will love her granddaughter "enough to show her some of the harshness that the world was ready and able to give her.” In reality, Stacy, like her mother and grandmother before her, has already experienced several harsh realities. In “Mermaid River,” a mother leaves her son with his grandmother while she settles in the U.S. This story artfully swings back and forth between the boy’s childhood in Jamaica to the time when he finally rejoins his mother and her husband as a young teen in Brooklyn. Other stories feature young adults, long detached from but not quite severed from their Jamaican roots, with various levels of self-awareness. “Only now does the history of that river sit on me,” says the narrator of “Mermaid River.” The same can be said of this strong debut collection, which beckons the reader back, again and again.
A lovely collection of stories that rewards subsequent readings.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9920-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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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