A portrait of motherhood, passion, and mental illness that cuts to the bone.
A young mother living in the French countryside is driven to madness.
Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, Argentinian author Harwicz’s first novel translated into English follows an unnamed mother heading toward a full mental breakdown. Living in a foreign (to her) countryside with her husband and young son, she feels at odds with every part of her life: her body, home, neighbors, desires, and mind. In a flashback of her pregnancy, she thinks “I’m one person, my body is two.” Her inability to balance being a mother and maintaining a sense of self beats incessantly at the heart of the novel. Her husband finds himself unable to understand, live with, and care for a wife struggling with severe depression. The erratic, stream-of-consciousness narrative provides a window into her crumbling state of mind. Both attacker and the attacked, she often feels like a cornered animal: “But I felt his gaze like a kitchen knife on my throat each time he came closer.” She spends much of the novel wondering what would be the worst case scenario for herself: living or dying. She fears the latter, not for herself, but for her son: “At most they’d sympathise a bit, but not with me. With the little boy who’s now motherless….No one grieves for the wretched woman with scarred arms who was consumed by the misery of life.” Unrestrained and unadorned, Harwicz’s writing has a wild beauty: “The sun began to set over their heads, the gentle light of dusk slowly tinting their bodies”; “I let the balsam of desire carry me away.” There’s a small sliver of light at the end of the novel, which is a much-needed exhale for both protagonist and reader.
A portrait of motherhood, passion, and mental illness that cuts to the bone.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9997227-8-4
Page Count: 123
Publisher: Charco Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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