Delightfully disarming stories for readers seeking a plunge down the rabbit hole.
A triptych of exquisitely crafted fables from miniaturist Loory (The Baseball Player and the Walrus, 2015, etc.)
For dedicated fans of Loory’s delicately constructed vignettes, this may be a perfect follow-up to his starred debut. Here, he’s divided the collection into three sections of 13 stories each, plus a final, slightly longer tribute, “Elmore Leonard.” His stories always begin simply enough: a person, sometimes an animal, and occasionally a personified element of nature, does something, and consequently something else happens. But then Loory makes some unexpected move that twists the story, often wryly. A man inherits a sword, and six pages later his wife shoots a man on their front lawn. A child has a very civil discussion with the monster that lives in his closet. We learn that War and Peace have a terrible domestic relationship. An older woman strikes up a casual relationship with Death in one story. Elsewhere, we meet a man who lives in a field of doors and a woman intermittently lost in a maze. Sometimes there’s anthropomorphism in stories that recall David Sedaris' Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk (2010). A dodo, long thought extinct, stands up for his true character in the opener, while a squid falls in love with the sun at the start of the next section. That’s without even getting into the hilarious encounter between a slightly stupid ostrich and some confused aliens Even when Loory attacks tropes, he manages to undermine them, as in “Zombies”: “The zombies are slaughtered—they’re a bunch of idiots. The whole thing’s pretty anticlimactic.” Often, he hits just the right beat at the right moment, as in the story about a man who wants to learn to write. “You lie, he whispered. And the writer smiled. And that, he said, is exactly how it goes.”
Delightfully disarming stories for readers seeking a plunge down the rabbit hole.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-313010-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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