A little skimpy, though warmed by the simple expressions of human emotion that make this author’s work special.
From best-selling Yoshimoto (Goodbye Tsugumi, 2002, etc.), two tales of young women grappling with death.
While hiking on a mountain road, the narrator of “Hardboiled” encounters a mysterious shrine with a circle of black, egg-sized stones and is “overcome by an extremely unpleasant sensation.” Ever since her affair with Chizuru, a woman who “could see things other people couldn’t,” she too has been able to sense when a place holds bad memories. At her hotel room in a nearby town, she’s plagued by a dream visit from the angry Chizuru, who died in a fire not long after the narrator left her, and then by a knock on the door from a woman locked out of her room. The black stones keep turning up in odd places, and the hotel guest turns out to be a ghost, but these unsettling developments actually help the narrator come to terms with her guilt about Chizuru. “Hard Luck” opens with another unnamed narrator visiting the hospital where her sister lies in a coma. Kuni “suffered a cerebral hemorrhage after staying up several nights in a row preparing a manual for the person who was going to take over her job when she quit to get married”—which is as close to social commentary as Yoshimoto ever gets. Instead, the grieving sister thinks about the “sacred time” Kuni’s approaching death offers to her family: “time set aside for us survivors to think about issues we didn’t usually consider.” Fans will recognize the author’s trademark blend of traditional Japanese philosophical concerns and plain contemporary prose in both stories, and her descriptions of the natural world are as lovely as ever. These short narratives, however, seem a little too short. Always a spare writer, Yoshimoto makes every word count, but a few more words might have given “Hardboiled” and “Hard Luck” the fuller resonance of her delightful novels.
A little skimpy, though warmed by the simple expressions of human emotion that make this author’s work special.Pub Date: July 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1799-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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