Lyrical, accessible, enchanting: Yoshimoto deserves her international popularity.
Two teenaged cousins spend a final summer in their seaside hometown, in the gentle, reflective latest from Yoshimoto (Asleep, 2000, etc.).
Because Maria’s father was unable to get a divorce, she and her mother lived throughout her childhood at the Yamamoto Inn, run by Maria’s aunt and uncle, seeing Dad only on weekends. This wasn’t easy, especially since life there was dominated by Maria’s sharp-tongued cousin Tsugumi, seriously ill since birth and determined to take it out on everyone around her. But the cousins have been close ever since Tsugumi faked a ghostly letter from Maria’s beloved and recently deceased grandfather—a peculiar incident that sets the tone for their relationship: Tsugumi is outrageous (by Japanese standards, anyway; Americans may find her merely crotchety); Maria values her blunt honesty and understands the pain that fuels her anger. Looking back as an adult, Maria mingles memories of their childhood with an account of their last summer together, just after Maria’s parents finally married and the family moved to Tokyo, and just before the Yamamotos sold the inn to start a European-style pension in the mountains. Yoshimoto’s trademark blend of slangy prose and traditional Japanese affinity for nature is here again, though typical of her fresh outlook is a lovely scene when the girls walk over a mountain at night to dispel their sorrow over the final broadcast of a favorite TV show. Tsugumi’s gruff charm and deep loneliness are well drawn, as is the quiet empathy of the young man she falls in love with. But the standout here is Maria: determinedly optimistic like her mother, yet affectionate toward by her father’s nervous, loving anxieties, she grows into a happy maturity with the knowledge that loss is an inevitable part of growing up. The slightly odd ending, which casually thwarts expectations of a tragic denouement for Tsugumi, reminds us that this author never settles for the expected.
Lyrical, accessible, enchanting: Yoshimoto deserves her international popularity.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8021-1638-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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