Dark, strange, elusive, compelling and oddly charming.
Icelandic novelist Ólafsson’s English-language debut is part Beckettian or even Kafkaesque black comedy, part existentialist novel in the Paul Auster mode, and part locked-room mystery in which the murderee is alive and well and hiding in the bedroom.
The narrator of this work by the Sugarcubes’ former bassist spends most of the novel cowering under his own bed. Emil has just returned to Reykjavik after a trip to London to blow some of his lottery windfall. As he settles down with his 36 new CDs, there’s a knock on the door. Peering through the curtains, he recognizes Havard, the erratic and violent drunk who, while helping Emil pet-sit in London years before, disappeared with two valuable items after having managed to kill three of the four animals in their care. (Two he dispatched via an unfortunate accident involving wet cement, and then, the last straw, he beheaded the homeowners’ iguana for biting him.) Emil thought he’d never see Havard again, who was packed off to Sweden after numerous entanglements with the law. Yet here he is, and so Emil—sensibly, more or less—scrambles under the bed and waits for his old bogeyman to give up knocking. Havard, though, gets in through the window, ostensibly to remove the teapot left boiling, and begins poking through the apartment and drinking Emil’s duty-free booze as he awaits his host’s arrival home. Throughout the evening, more people arrive: a linguist Emil sat beside on the plane, whose spectacles he inadvertently brought home; Greta, the fantasy girl of his youth whom he met again in a lavatory queue on the flight; and several friends come to claim their gift CDs. Before long Havard is hosting a bizarre, alcohol-soaked party/vigil, with Emil observing events from his hidden vantage point.
Dark, strange, elusive, compelling and oddly charming.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-934824-01-6
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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