It’s puzzling what Nothomb’s purpose was with this novel, but it feels like such a hasty job that one isn’t tempted to spend...
In the tradition of novels about intense, artistic female friendships, Nothomb's light-hearted latest features flamboyant characters and copious drinking of champagne.
Nothomb (Hygiene and the Assassin, 2010, etc.) has published more than 20 other novels, which is startling because this one reads like a fledgling effort. The writing feels cursory, and the story doesn’t acquire even the depth needed to be a good farce. The novel (or novella—it’s only 128 pages) is narrated by a writer, also named Amélie Nothomb, with a devotion to drinking bubbly. There’s a pleasant description of her introduction to it—“I looked into the darkest place and I saw, and heard, jewels. Their multiple fragments tinkled with precious gems, with gold and silver”—but after that poetic start, Nothomb’s lyricism seems exhausted. At a reading, the narrator is approached by Pétronille, a sexually ambiguous waif who greatly intrigues her. When she deduces that Pétronille likes to drink, the two quickly develop a friendship, with the older Amélie both revered and mocked by her irreverent wild-child friend. This is a promising setup but nothing interesting—little conflict, seemingly no intimacy—develops between them. And Nothomb’s flat writing doesn’t create any buoyancy for her story. For instance, Amélie goes to London to interview the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and, after an unhappy experience with her, invites Pétronille to join her. The women visit the British Museum, and Nothomb writes: “We agreed to meet in Mesopotamia at noon. It’s not every day you can schedule a meeting in such a place.” The second sentence dulls the lightness of the first and is characteristic of a novel that seems to state the obvious at every turn. From a skiing trip in the Alps to a crisis where Pétronille resents her own status as a minor author, nothing is rendered with either enough wit or depth to be entertaining.
It’s puzzling what Nothomb’s purpose was with this novel, but it feels like such a hasty job that one isn’t tempted to spend much time figuring it out.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60945-290-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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