Navel—or, rather, vagina—gazing loaded with literary pretensions.
A prizewining French bestseller tells of a woman obsessed with one man. It’s framed within her story of a woman’s obsession with men in general. Or maybe it’s vice versa.
Laurens’s sixth outing (though first to appear in English) twists the novel-within-a-novel structure in such a way that we’re not sure which scenes are the fictional creation of the narrator—also named Camille—and which are the narrator’s “real” life. Not that the distinction matters much. All the scenes are about the men—real, fictional, or abstract—in the Camilles’ lives and imaginations. At the start, Camille sees a man in a restaurant and decides he is The One, so she follows him to his office and, when she realizes he’s a therapist, begins to see him as a patient supposedly in need of marriage counseling. At the same time, Camille meets with a male editor to discuss her novel about the men in a fictional Camille’s life. The scenes that follow are a mix of first- and third-person, all describing Camille’s men. There are her distant and rather sad father, her beloved maternal grandfather, her molesting great-uncle, her first love, her teacher, and the husband with whom she has known great passion but is now bound only as the father of her daughters. There are lovers and anonymous sexual liaisons. There are men she only imagines, and men who represent their gender. There are absent men, particularly the son who died in infancy. There is the man she imagines reading her book. With dry wit and wordplay (“. . . all men are taken. But with some, there’s give and take,” or “There are forbidden men, men you find forbidding”), the narrator ruminates around all of them. Camille—whichever Camille she is—offers clever commentary but not much depth.
Navel—or, rather, vagina—gazing loaded with literary pretensions.Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50652-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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
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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