Sensitive proof that understanding lies as much in the details as in the broad strokes.
Again, Desai explores cultural fault lines as she describes a young American’s experiences in Mexico.
Strongly evoking a distant time and place—Mexico in the early 1900s—Desai (stories: Diamond Dust, 2000, etc.) introduces protagonist Eric, a historian who has lost faith in academics because he prefers detail to generalities. He’s been living with Em in Boston, where she pursues her medical studies with single-minded determination, and when Em announces she must visit Mexico to do research, Eric decides to go along too. Once there, Em has her own agenda, and when Eric, left on his own in Mexico City, by chance hears aging ethnographer Dona Vera talk about her work with Huichol Indians, he recognizes some of the places she mentions: they’re the places his Cornish grandfather described when he told young Eric about his experiences mining silver in Mexico, where Eric’s father was born in the midst of Pancho Villa and Zapata’s revolution. Eric, who like his father has never quite fit in—both men are imaginative and solitary—next travels to the remote region in the Sierra where silver was once mined, and, after one night at Dona Vera’s hacienda in the valley, takes a bus to the mountainside town. The former mining town is mostly abandoned, but with the Day of the Dead at hand, it fills up as visitors come to honor their dead. Between Eric’s arrival in the town and his search for his grandmother’s grave, Desai tells the story of how young Betty left Cornwall to marry Eric’s grandfather David, adjusted to life in a Mexican village, but died giving birth to Eric’s father. Eric, deeply affected, gives his vivid imagination free rein as a night in the cemetery becomes a transformative encounter with both the living and the dead.
Sensitive proof that understanding lies as much in the details as in the broad strokes.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-04215-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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