An utterly captivating story of identity whose reissue should be heartily welcomed.
This latest reissue of a modern classic (an earlier edition called Hermaphrodeity, by Alan Friedman, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1973) shows the many lives and loves of a hermaphrodite.
Early on in life, a little girl named Millie Nemos begins to suspect she might be different from other girls. Precocious sex games with her brother Sandy provoke very confusing reactions, and by the time she enters college, she’s sarcastically aware of the whole truth: “I was their prize—Harvard’s only genuine hermaphrodite.” Her story is a ribald, hugely entertaining tale of sexual encounters and torrid love affairs (and occasionally even “beatific, humdrum love”) in far-flung locales, as Millie—and her masculine self, Willie—wanders hilariously all over the sexual landscape. There’s a combustible relationship with the sultry Flaminia (the author has a good deal of innocent fun with character names) and a more complicated, long-term encounter with her boss, professor Satori—“I see his heavy head with its shag rug of yellow-white hair, I see his ugly nose (enormous—more than a facial feature, it was a trademark), I see the thick, dirty nails with which he scraped walls and dirt and powdery clay and spidery coral”—and with another powerful older man, the enigmatic art collector Mr. Tieger. All the while, Millie/Willie searches restlessly for a deeper purpose in life, compulsively reading and writing with the mindset that “there was a mystery in me, ancient and undeciphered and prehuman.” The author (anonymous this time around) packs this story of “the mind-splitting polarity of my personality—a public man with a private womb”—with entertaining, often quite lovely prose. Deeper philosophical ruminations on the nature of sexuality and poetry run convincingly alongside well-done adventures in exotic locations; in a standout episode, there’s an interlude in “the blind glory of Venice” and a taut encounter there with a surprisingly complex gondolier. The book’s climactic turn into the world of big business and tricky advertising forms a perfect coda to this story about selling a narrative of the self.
An utterly captivating story of identity whose reissue should be heartily welcomed.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475985269
Page Count: 538
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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