Though the book could use a few more characters as richly drawn as Marroné, he deserves the spotlight as a bumbling Everyman...
This clever comic novel about a conventional Argentinian businessman caught up in guerilla politics is buoyantly relentless in its biting satire.
Argentine novelist and translator Gamerro (The Islands, 2012, etc.) uses the context of early 1970s Peronist political turmoil for his farce, originally published in Spanish in 2004. Our protagonist is Marroné, a placid middle manager devoted to inspirational business texts such as Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence People. When Marroné’s CEO is kidnapped by a guerilla group—frustrating Marroné’s plans to make a pitch for a promotion—his severed finger is delivered by mail to his flustered staff. Then Marroné, by now established as a deeply conventional and repressed family man, is himself abducted by the rebels and imprisoned in a plaster factory—the one where they make the eponymous busts of Eva Perón. Gamerro makes full use of his contradiction-rich setting, including bourgeois schoolboys appropriating fierce rebel names and Marroné’s dogged efforts to maintain his plans for corporate advancement in the guerilla hideout. In one hilarious passage, Marroné considers Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of how well they illustrate business management principles. In another, he contemplates Evita as a masterpiece of image-creation: “Eva Perón was a born winner, a self-made woman who had created a product—herself—that millions in Argentina and around the world had bought and consumed.” Marroné’s persistently market-driven constructions are some of the funniest things in the book, especially when other factors suggest his flirtation with rebel leadership could turn his life around. But this seesawing makes him a very funny hero.
Though the book could use a few more characters as richly drawn as Marroné, he deserves the spotlight as a bumbling Everyman caught up in a struggle between political change and his own selfishness.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-908276-50-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: & Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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
BOOK REVIEW
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