A readable but clumsy primer on desire's insistence on living fully, whatever the outcome.
Anti-apartheid author Brink (Devil's Valley, 1999, etc.) has adapted to the new dispensation with stylistically experimental novels. But his latest, except for an awkward trace of magical realism, more conventionally details the painful lessons an old man learns when he falls in love.
Because South Africa is still evolving, current politics are as much a part of the story as ever, but the mood is more somber. Services are breaking down, corruption is rising, and violent crimes are commonplace. In this increasingly menacing situation, where things seems to be falling apart, the protagonist and narrator, 65-year-old widower Ruben Olivier, recounts how the young, beautiful, untrustworthy Tessa Butler comes to be his lodger. His home is built on the 18th-century foundations of a house where a Malay slave, Antje of Bengal, murdered her master's wife. Antje, who was executed thereafter, now roams the house meddling in matters of the heart, though her story, suggesting clumsy parallels to the past, is more intrusive than instructive. After a neighbor is brutally murdered and Ruben suffers a heart attack, his sons insist that he move. They're reassured, however, when Tessa joins him. Ruben, a reclusive librarian whose job was given to a hero of the Struggle, has been mourning his wife, the baby she miscarried, and their subsequent estrangement, but is immediately infatuated with Tessa. Fighting his desires and his jealousy—Tessa has multiple lovers and soon needs an abortion—he eventually helps the family's longtime housekeeper Magrieta find a house after a gang burns her old home down, witnesses thugs sexually assaulting Tessa, and learns more about himself. In time, Tessa, more cliché than character, helps Ruben understand how his reluctance to fight led to a breakdown in his marriage and shaped his past.
A readable but clumsy primer on desire's insistence on living fully, whatever the outcome.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100654-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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