Smart, well rounded—suggesting very good things to come.
Eight stories about the idea of Eden—the serpent just out of sight—in a promising debut.
The characters here attempt to create havens for themselves, small spaces that deny the disappointment of a dispiriting reality. The opening tale, “Rug Weaver,” examines the displacement of Ebrahim, an Iranian Jew now living in LA. Imprisoned for a time when the Shah was deposed, Ebrahim waited for death (he assumed) by weaving an allegorical rug through the bars of his prison cell window. The solace became a passion as he was able to grasp paradise in the mundane. But now, living with his son and his perky, blond daughter-in-law, he feels an isolation as acute as that in the prison cell, but without the consolation of his imaginary rug. In the title story, a New England couple escape to southern California after their son’s death from AIDS. They spend their weekends touring suburban housing developments, perfect, manicured places that seem to deny the possibility of death. And in “December Birthday” another older couple, Holocaust survivors, try to keep their grown daughter “safe” from the world by keeping her childlike. Far the two best are “The Consolations of Art,” a sweetly told tale of an old man whose feisty new caretaker is able to respark his interest in life, and “Camping In,” an oddly menacing piece about an affluent young mother and the adolescent girl she hires to tidy up everyday. The underprivileged girl becomes strangely proprietorial about the grand house, pushing the mother to the point of paranoia. The ending novella, “The Palm Tree of Dilys Cathcart,” has a touch of Anita Brookner. A middle-aged English music teacher is asked by her neighbor, an Orthodox Jew, to transcribe the music he hears in his head when studying the Kabala. The two form a purely working relationship, but too much prior loneliness soon has Dilys wandering in kosher markets and dreamily considering conversion.
Smart, well rounded—suggesting very good things to come.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05712-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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