Wonderful in places, but sometimes more of a downer than many readers may bargain for; Richman’s latest could have withstood...
Richman explores the story of two couples whose lives touch in unexpected ways.
When Octavio met Salome, she was a beautiful schoolgirl with thick dark tresses and the most beautiful face he had ever seen. Every day Octavio, a college student and struggling poet, schemed to come up with ploys to meet the young girl, finally settling on using the poems of one of Chile’s masters to capture her heart. Years later, Octavio is a famous, though reluctant, actor, whose political participation has put him, his children and, worst of all, his beautiful Salome, in danger. Meanwhile, across the ocean, another drama is playing out in the form of a young and extremely poor Finnish family that is barely surviving during the dark days of World War II. The family, three young boys, a beautiful mother and a husband recently returned wounded from the fighting, struggles to provide sustenance for its members. Soon, the woman finds she is pregnant and gives birth to a tiny, perfect blonde daughter who captures her heart. But her husband, bitter that he is no longer the man he once was, makes a heartbreaking decision that alters all of their lives and leads his baby daughter through an unanticipated journey to Sweden. Richman develops strong characters but heaps so much misery and unhappiness upon the ones she devises that readers may often feel besieged with their situations and despair. Her strongest passages take place in Finland and in the early days of the lives of two of her characters—Samuel and Kaija—but the author tends to repeat herself a great deal, hauling readers through the same scenes told from the same character’s point of view. The author's strengths include her beautiful, evocative language and sense of place. Chile, Finland and Sweden all come alive through Richman’s adept prose.
Wonderful in places, but sometimes more of a downer than many readers may bargain for; Richman’s latest could have withstood some judicious pruning without losing its rhythm.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-425-25877-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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
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