A literary lark, at times too labored, that offers an amusing gloss on the publishing industry’s recent problems with fakes.
Novelist Phillips (The Song is You, 2009, etc.) introduces a long-lost Shakespeare play, the titular Tragedy. This extraordinary find…
No, wait. Something’s wrong here. How come the introduction is more than twice as long as the play? Why are the editors, in their preface, urging us to read the play directly while bypassing the introduction? And why would Phillips say of the play, “It is bad. Don’t read it”? It’s all a game, of course. Ignore those editors. Read the convoluted introduction, and you’ll find it’s Phillips’s fifth novel, masquerading as autobiography. Young Arthur, named for his dad, grew up in 1960s Minneapolis with his twin sister Dana, his beloved soul mate. The kids were in awe of their father, the inspiration for this novel. He was a wonder worker, a maker of miracles. Too bad he was also a forger who would spend years in prison. One more thing: He was an ardent Shakespearean. Dana inherited his love of the plays; Arthur didn’t. The first, rambling half of the novel covers Arthur’s adolescence and adulthood and his years as a successful expatriate writer in Prague, married to a Czech. The plot kicks in late. Arthur, back stateside, is given an assignment by his dying dad. There’s a lost Shakespeare play in a safe-deposit box. Arthur must use his credibility as a writer to get it published. The ploy works. Scholars authenticate the work. Only Arthur, to his dismay, realizes too late that it’s a fake. There follows a fight between Arthur, trying to prevent publication but by now contractually bound, and his publisher, using all its corporate muscle. There’s also a nifty subplot involving Dana, who’s gay, her sweetheart, and dastardly behavior by Arthur, all of this linked to the play’s publication. After the hijinks, the play is an anticlimax, a decent enough pastiche about martial prowess and a less-than-martial king.
A literary lark, at times too labored, that offers an amusing gloss on the publishing industry’s recent problems with fakes.Pub Date: April 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6647-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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