Enlightening and marked by inventive subject matter, intense reflection and stark eloquence.
Luna’s debut novel, about the lives of homesteaders who occupy abandoned tenements in New York’s Lower East Side, is an unvarnished glimpse into a fringe sector of society during the latter part of the 20th century.
The occupants of Thirteen House are NYC’s invisible people, imperfect and damaged, who nevertheless strive to maintain the community and families they’ve created. Philandering husband Steve, who opened the building in the 1980s, professes to love his wife, Anne, and wants to protect her; but Anne becomes increasingly distant and resentful. The product of a middle-class upbringing, she’s suffered four miscarriages and has nothing to show for her years of marriage, especially when she compares her life with her sister’s. Dutch-born Gerrit, a veteran homesteader and Steve’s best friend, is ashamed of his physical deficiencies and past decisions; but he’s consumed with love for young Amelia, the former junkie/runaway whom he rescued from the streets seven years ago. Amelia’s now pregnant—though not with Gerrit’s child—and she’s worried about her future and the looming decisions she must make. Steve’s first love, Cat, lives in neighboring Cat House, which is named for her. Cat’s a legend among the squatters due to her association with certain celebrities when she was young and beautiful. Now she prefers a more insular life with her menagerie of cats, and she and Amelia develop an unlikely rapport. With other members of their squatter family, the five make ends meet with mainstream day jobs, but evenings find them Dumpster diving and salvaging materials to feed themselves and repair their buildings. However, the city’s plan to evict them forces the squatters into action: They set up an eviction watch and enlist a lawyer to argue their case. As their convictions become embroiled with their crumbling private lives, they are swept into actions that determine their fates. Luna creates an array of complex characters caught up in emotions, relationships and situations far from the ordinary as they examine their commitments to their merged family and explore their own ideals and expectations.
Enlightening and marked by inventive subject matter, intense reflection and stark eloquence.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-935639-64-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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