A wearyingly discursive if often very funny fictional autobiography in the form of a diary kept by the less accomplished of a proud progressive couple's deeply divergent twin sons. William, the elder (by seven minutes), grows up in the 1960s in Cambridge, Mass., among a ``distracted, quasi-Bohemian family'' that includes his cheerful, universally admired prodigy brother Clive, and parents who lovingly encourage healthful nudity and candid family discussions of adolescent masturbation and other (preferably, William would say) guilty secrets. William, who demonstrates precocity only as a curmudgeon, is in fact his exemplary brother's intellectual equal (perhaps superior). But he delights in disappointing others' expectations (for reasons never really made clear). In a skimpy chronological narrative that's nevertheless buoyed by Anastas's gift for offbeat comic phrasing, we learn of William's successive disgraces as a slow learner of the basics of infancy and childhood (in the matter of toilet training, for example, he grunts and strains inefficiently in contrast to Clive, ``a Green Beret in diapers''); a sickly adolescent who pines for beauteous schoolmate Faith Crick (Clive's girlfriend, naturally) but is usually paired with elephantine Dorothea Zimmerman; a private-school failure at ``bootcamp-style intramural sports'' and a sexual misfit who rejects his brother's offers to help him lose his virginity . . . on and on it goes, through quickly sketched college experiences, when William has a drinking problem and a girlfriend ``prone to short disappearances, broken dates and lapses of memory that included my name.'' Inconclusive further adventures in San Francisco and New York City precede the abandonment of William's diary (another task he can't complete). One wants to keep quoting, but not necessarily to keep reading what's essentially a (pretty good) one-joke book. This is, however, on balance a first novel in need of a plot.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-31998-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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