The effect of the absurd, unnatural, cruel, and unfair social rules in these stories is to cast light on how absurd,...
Short stories that combine steampunk imagery with absurdist fantasy to explore gender roles.
In her debut collection, Grudova borrows whirling gears from steampunk fantasy and clicking carapaces from horror, but these slender stories lack the robust plot conventions of the more popular genres they draw from, belonging instead in the genre of literary fiction. The stories’ principal emotion is melancholy disgust, often tinged with longing and dread. Grudova name-checks Hans Christian Andersen, Isak Dinesen, and Ovid; her characters metamorphose into wolves, insects, machines. “I feel part wrought iron, part human and, I won’t lie, part vermin,” says the narrator of “Notes from a Spider,” but that could be a line from almost any of these stories. In the opening story, “Unstitching,” first one woman and then another finds a way to “unstitch” herself, letting her clothes, skin, and hair fall away: “She did not so much resemble a sewing machine as she was the ideal form on which a sewing machine was based. The closest thing she resembled in nature was an ant.” The men who try to do the same, however, end up "wounded and disappointed. They had no ‘true, secret’ selves inside, only what was taught and known.” The most successful of the stories are the ones that most explicitly address gender roles and women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy. In “Waxy,” women work in factories to support their Men, who go to school (forbidden to women) and study for Exams; to avoid the expense of contraception or raising children, many Men prefer to have sex with girls who have not yet begun to menstruate. In “The Moth Emporium,” the narrator looks at her husband differently after he allows an artist to install sculptures depicting a rape and murder in their home, which is also a costume shop.
The effect of the absurd, unnatural, cruel, and unfair social rules in these stories is to cast light on how absurd, unnatural, cruel, and unfair the rules of contemporary society can be.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-490-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
SEEN & HEARD
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
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
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