Echoes of Dinesen, Borges, and Djuna Barnes sound throughout this debut collection of eight curiously linked stories, first published to great acclaim in 1994 by the Trinidadian-born Canadian author of the equally highly praised first novel Childhood (1998). Metafictional whimsy and eerie nightmarish visions jostle together in this uneven yet engaging volume, which begins brilliantly with “The Night Piece.” Here, an impressionable teenaged wedding guest infers, from a story of vampiric possession told to him by a fellow guest, that “his fate had changed”: specifically, that he now knows the adult world bristles with mysteries and dangers he had only imperfectly intuited. The concluding story, —The Road to Santiago de Compostela,— is almost as good: a witty exchange (a la Boccaccio) of stories “about Love, or Ottawa, or Love in Ottawa” among four Canadians in France on a pilgrimage whose tale-telling comprises a compact faux-Platonic debate on the nature of love. Other pieces—grouped to focus on their respective protagonists “Michael” and “Andre”—exhibit a frustrating unevenness. “Kuala Lumpur,” for example, diffuses the potential resonance of its arresting premises: a culture that puts a son to death when his father dies; and “Metaphysics of Morals” extracts a lame meditation on the contraries of evil and innocence from an anecdote about a dropped glove. But the amusing “My Anabasis” transforms fear of marital infidelity into a wry consideration of emigration and identity that’s also a clever gloss on Canadian Ernest Buckler’s celebrated novel The Mountain and the Valley. And the five-part title story, though it’s resolutely anecdotal, gets rich parabolic mileage out of its several illustrations of “the mysterious ways by which death enters the world.” Not a complete success: opacity and coyness crop up far too much. But convincing evidence of the stylistic assurance and thematic range of an eccentrically gifted writer.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-5979-2
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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