Multiple readings could perhaps yield more insight—not an onerous task since this is one of the more beautiful books in...
The brilliant minds of today and yesteryear crowd into the exquisitely designed pages of this odd folly of an art novel.
Seeing no reason to leave well enough alone, globetrotting Ivy League jeweler Zucker continues the fictional experiment he first assayed in the much-ballyhooed Blue (2000). Here, Green has a character of sorts in the figure of Abraham Talcott, a gem merchant in Greenwich Village who leads a dismally uninteresting life. Fortunately, Zucker is using Tal only as the most slender of threads upon which to hang his obsessive themes. For this is no ordinary story. Tal’s occupies only a small portion of each right-hand page. The remainder is taken up by commentaries and quotations that, at first blush, seem to have only the most tangential relationship with Tal’s story. Additionally, every left-hand page in this coffeetable-sized volume is entirely taken up by a reproduction of a painting, photograph, or design. The structure of Green is intentionally Talmudic, though many of its themes are far more secular. Meantime, the cast of characters Zucker calls upon for his commentaries and imagery is a pleasing one: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cézanne, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Black Elk, lots and lots of Bob Dylan, and a host of rabbis and religious scholars. Any attempt at a straight reading is quickly rebuffed, for the story of Tal, his acquaintances and musings, is almost aggressively noninvolving. As a result, the reader’s eye turns to the pictures—lush imagery from Vermeer, Pollock, and Blake—and all those commentaries crowding each page. The babble of voices is obviously meant to be taken from multiple directions, like the facets of a gem. But why? What is the reader supposed to get out of this experience besides a desire to listen to Bob Dylan and maybe read up on their Fitzgerald?
Multiple readings could perhaps yield more insight—not an onerous task since this is one of the more beautiful books in recent memory—but it’s difficult to regard Green as anything more than a curio.Pub Date: May 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-174-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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