A provocative and very funny exploration of Muslim identity in America today.
A secular Muslim searches for his place in America in this biting satire from first-time novelist Eteraz (Falsipedies and Fibsiennes, 2014, etc.).
As a teenager growing up in Alabama, M. saw Islam as “one of those things that foreigners did, like soccer, or kung fu, or Bollywood.” So it comes as something of a surprise to this second-generation American, now living in Philadelphia, when he loses his PR job after his new boss, at M.’s apartment for a work party, spots a Quran high atop a bookshelf and determines M. isn’t “democratic” enough for the “business-culture” of the company. A “protected” child of the 1980s and '90s who eats “the West, breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” M. feels particularly unequipped to fight discrimination. “The bespectacled gadfly from Chicago I had grown up with wasn’t Malik El-Shabazz but Steven Q. Urkel,” he laments early on. At the insistence of his wife, Marie-Anne, a white South Carolinian suffering a cortisol imbalance that's made her gain tremendous weight, M. becomes a freelance marketing consultant and “social-media maven.” Soon he's immersed in a diverse set of Muslim communities: creating a PowerPoint for a “playboy princeling” hoping to sell exercise DVDs to American audiences, partying with the members of a punk rock/rap group called the Gay Commie Muzzies, under the employ of the “Muslim Outreach Coordinator” at the State Department. Though at times in need of a trim (M.’s interior monologues can feel repetitive by book’s end), Eteraz’s narrative is witty and unpredictable. Marie-Anne, whose weight and domineering nature make her at first seem potentially cartoonish, becomes more complicated as the novel progresses, and the darkly comic ending is pleasingly macabre. As for M., in this identity-obsessed dandy, Eteraz has created a perfect protagonist for the times.
A provocative and very funny exploration of Muslim identity in America today.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61775-436-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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