A novel with a paradoxical combination of warmth and guile.
Chilean author Skármeta (The Postman, 1995, etc.) returns to post-dictatorship Santiago in this tale of beauty, crime and revenge.
In an attempt to deplete Santiago’s overflowing jails—and in part to right a previous wrong—the government has suddenly granted an amnesty for nonviolent prisoners. Among those released are Ángel Santiago, a young man who years earlier had stolen a horse, and Nicolás Vergara Gray, a notorious (but gentle and reflective) bank robber. Ángel has been seared by his experience in prison, most notably for having been literally tossed into a den of thieves and brutalized at the behest of the evil warden Santoro. Now that he’s out he wants revenge, and because Santoro knows of this desire, on the sly the warden also lets out Rigoberto Marín, a lifer, for 30 days, to allow him to assassinate Ángel. Ángel, however, doesn’t just want revenge, he wants romance, and this comes to him unexpectedly in the form of Victoria Ponce, a 17-year-old dancer who’s recently been booted from school for truancy and general recalcitrance. While their relationship is intensely sexual, it’s also very sweet, for Ángel, who has a photographic memory, begins to tutor Victoria so that she can complete her academic education and attend dance school. Meanwhile, Vergara Gray wants nothing more than to be reunited with his long-suffering wife Teresa, but he finds her both indifferent and impatient—she’s suffered enough. Intrigue thickens as the recently released prisoners find themselves woefully short of money; they need to be creative in coming up with ways to find enough cash to eke out a day-to-day existence on the gritty streets of the city. To aid them, criminal genius Lira the Dwarf, whose brilliance is in inverse proportion to his stature, sends Vergara Gray a letter from jail outlining a plan to make them all rich.
A novel with a paradoxical combination of warmth and guile.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-393-06494-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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