A compassionate masterpiece.
Isobel Callaghan, a struggling young writer with a difficult past, collapses on the way to buy provisions at the corner store and soon finds herself—much to her surprise—recovering from tuberculosis in the self-contained society of Mornington Sanatorium.
Australian writer Witting's (I is for Isobel, 1989, etc.) quietly brilliant novel was published in her own country in 1999 and is appearing in the U.S. for the first time; it's set in the middle of the 20th century. Anxious, poor, and isolated, Isobel is worried she’s losing her mind. She’s quit her job (translating German mail at an importers) in a rage and, buoyed by the encouragement of a highbrow editor, has taken an attic room in a Sydney boardinghouse to write fiction. Now, overridden by social anxiety and rapidly running out of money, Isobel has begun to deteriorate in a way she doesn’t understand. Upon collapsing in the street, she’s taken to a local hospital; her madness, it seems, is better known as tuberculosis. “How could she explain the relief she felt at learning that this thing had a name and a location, that there were people whose business it was to deal with it?” she wonders. Surrendered to her new circumstances—a material improvement, all things considered—Isobel finds herself falling into the sanatorium’s rhythms. Though the patients are all bedridden, to varying degrees, the place has a social scene of its own, with the doctors, nurses, and patients forming a parallel universe outside of space and time. Witting’s characterizations are staggeringly sharp—it is hard to imagine a novel more keenly observed—simultaneously heartbreaking and (subtly) hilarious, not because they're exaggerated, but because they are so unsettlingly, overwhelmingly true: Isobel's pathologically self-centered roommate (“You’re not one of those people who read all the time, are you?”); her beloved Dr. Wang; the birdlike Miss Landers, who runs the sanatorium’s knitting-based occupational therapy program. But as Isobel recovers, she must come to terms with her life outside the confines of this miniature world—and here, too, Witting is as astute and unsentimental as ever.
A compassionate masterpiece.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-922182-71-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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