Too talky by half, and the pensive, sometimes gloomy atmosphere, though well suited to the San Francisco fog, won’t appeal...
It’s 1962. The world is about to change, and Inez Roseman can’t wait for it to do so—or to check out of its travails.
Former Hungry Mind Review editor Schneider turns in a prequel to Secret Love (2001), a title more suited to this book than to its predecessor. Inez is a talented if moody violinist for the San Francisco Symphony; it doesn’t help that she’s turning 40 and that her husband, a flashy attorney, has become an accomplished philanderer and now speaks to her mostly when he wants to criticize her: “If I wanted to marry Olive Oyl, I’d have married Olive Oyl.” “Inez, you can’t play the gas pedal like it’s the pedal on a bass drum.” Jake Roseman is a skilled bon vivant, mixes a fine highball, and makes a lot of money, but he’s not much of a husband, and Inez, embarking on a difficult solo career, needs more attention than he seems willing to give. Enter Sylvia Bran, a plain but beguiling woman ten years Inez’s junior, who introduces herself as a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle wanting to do a profile of Inez. Her would-be subject has never seen her byline, and therein hangs a good part of Schneider’s tale, which, if sometimes melodramatic, is always believable and hits the right period-detail notes. This is true even when Schneider turns up the heat between Inez and Sylvia, threatening to scald a few eyeballs in the process; though the result is plenty steamy, there’s also the nodding understanding between the two that though this sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen in their day and age (“ ‘Do you think it’s terribly unnatural?’ Sylvia asks”), it does. And so do many other things that, in the end, tear the Rosemans’ house apart, thus setting the stage for what follows in Secret Love.
Too talky by half, and the pensive, sometimes gloomy atmosphere, though well suited to the San Francisco fog, won’t appeal to readers in need of cheering up. Still, Schneider spins a good yarn—and he knows his Mendelsohn.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5442-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Shaye Areheart/Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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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