The willed spareness of the stories grows annoying, but at her best Smith is an original observer of the blessings and...
A collection of 12 smartly constructed observations of the way we think and write, from Whitbread Award–winning Scottish author Smith (The Accidental, 2006, etc.).
The book offers compellingly quirky demonstrations of how our imaginations react to ordinary people and everyday occurrences. For example, in “True Short Story,” an overheard conversation about the differences between the novel and the short story elicits complex counter-arguments and speculations from the narrator, who begins to consider the conversation’s relevance to her close friend’s painful treatment for cancer and to figures in Ovidian myth. In “No Exit,” the question of whether a movie theater’s “Exit” sign is actually a misdirection evokes the narrator’s fear, empathy and imaginative powers. In three companion stories that include the title piece, “The Second Person” and “The Third Person,” couples debate and fabricate possible future scenarios for their lives together and apart. Stories that employ essentially conventional plots range from a disappointingly undeveloped account of the confusions visited on the mother of a boy stricken with an undiagnosable debilitating illness (“I Know Something You Don’t Know”) and on the boy himself, to a virtually perfect Kafkaesque nightmare (“The Child”) in which a woman shopper finds her cart occupied by someone else’s baby, tries and fails to persuade others the child isn’t hers, then helplessly “adopts” it briefly—hearing from its precociously foul mouth a litany of misogynistic and racist abuse that vividly renders every would-be mother’s irrational fears about what she might be bringing into the world.
The willed spareness of the stories grows annoying, but at her best Smith is an original observer of the blessings and curses of living inside one’s imagination.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-37771-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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