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
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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