Draped lightly on the reader, Lopez’s moral fiber offers a protection against diminishment and offers security for acting on...
Nine vignettes framed as letters addressing questions of personal responsibility in a diminished world: obliquely revelatory yet fiercely biting.
The letters come from writers and activists on the lam from what may be perceived as threats from the Office of Homeland Security, though Lopez (Light Action in the Caribbean, 2000, etc.), a National Book Award–winner, is not so bald as to state the threat as such (he terms it “Inland Security, the group of people we had come to call the Idiots of Light”). As ever, Lopez’s writing is economical, full of silences demanding that the reader unfold the mysteries embedded in them. But the mind’s eye is fully nourished; Lopez uses each letter-writer’s sense of place as context, circumstance, opportunity, and beauty: seams of lapis lazuli, the braided perfume of orchids and ridisses, the primed landscape that glitters at its edges, “the wordless kinship . . . an elusive and elevated physical sense of being present in the world.” Yet place and nature aren’t paramount in Lopez’s concerns, as is often the case; rather, the inner struggles—devotion to life, love, tolerance, innocence, and ideals of justice—occupy center stage with the force of concentrated light. The letter-writers are indigenous rights workers, social historians, translators, civil rights advocates, land activists, ex-soldiers, curators, and artists, each of them a threat to fear-mongering, indifference, goose-stepping, and state scrutiny. This is because they work to dodge the memory hole—“everything, even the buffalo, is still around . . . as long as people are telling stories about them”—and because they envision “what it can mean to have your country under you like a hammock . . . instead of using your people as fodder in a war to control the world’s meaning and expression.”
Draped lightly on the reader, Lopez’s moral fiber offers a protection against diminishment and offers security for acting on awareness, coherence, decency, and grace. (Nine monotypes by Alan Magee.)Pub Date: June 13, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4220-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
