Mukherjee explores Anjali’s issues with understanding and sympathy.
A tightly woven narrative about naïvete and personal growth in contemporary India.
The title refers to Anjali Bose, who’s trying to delicately balance her identity between the “old” India of her parents and the “new” (and more Westernized) India of her peers. Nineteen-year-old Anjali is from Gauripur, in Bihar province, a not-very-happening place. Her dissatisfaction and boredom are compounded by her lackluster lower-middle-class household, for her father wants to arrange a marriage for his daughter, and Anjali has little patience for this hoary convention. Moreover, her father’s track record is unprepossessing, for Anjali’s only slightly older sister has been through the process and is already divorced. Despite her father’s trotting out more than 75 possible candidates, Anjali has found no one she likes or respects. It’s conceivable that Anjali herself is part of the problem, for she wants far more than either her family or her environment can give her. And when one seemingly ideal candidate for the position of husband rapes her, Anjali is out of there. After a brief stop at the apartment of her unsympathetic sister, and with the urging of ex-pat English teacher Peter Champion, she heads off to Bangalore to test her English-speaking skills in the burgeoning service industry being outsourced to that teeming city. Within 24 hours of her arrival, she has come in contact with a more diverse group of people than she had met in her entire life. Armed with an introduction (from Peter) to Minnie Bagehot’s boarding house, she meets the seductive Husseina, the Christian Tookie from Goa, and the eccentric “Mad Minnie” herself. Despite a two-week cram course in colloquial English, Anjali fails (in a hilarious way from the reader’s perspective) to land a job. And she faces other reality checks as well, including being dragged into the local police station and being completely duped by Husseina.
Mukherjee explores Anjali’s issues with understanding and sympathy.Pub Date: May 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-618-64653-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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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