Two unnerving, challenging stories about identity sparked by subtle delights and surprising ends.
A pair of eerie, minimalist novellas by the gifted Argentinean writer Aira (Ema the Captive, 2016, etc.).
Shades of The Twilight Zone and Quentin Tarantino’s cinematic blood baths linger over these two unnerving novellas, neither of which is anything like the other. In The Little Buddhist Monk, Aira introduces us to a diminutive but endlessly curious Korean monk who dreams of going to Europe or America. If there is a central motif to the work, it is a meditation on the nature of dreams. “Practical people say that dreams serve no purpose; but they can’t deny that at least they allow one to dream,” the monk muses, later remembering, “It costs nothing to dream.” In due course, the monk meets French photographer Napoleon Chirac and his cartoonist wife, Jacqueline Bloodymary, becoming their guide to the country’s shrines. It should come as no surprise to Aira’s readers that the monk, his dreams, and indeed his very reality turn out to be not what they appear. The follow-up novella, The Proof, finds Aira back in more familiar territory with a story set in Buenos Aires, but its conclusion is no less shocking. The story seems designed to shock, as two punk-rock lesbians brace timid Marcia in the street with a startling query, “Wannafuck?” In trying to figure out “Mao” and “Lenin,” Marcia finds herself enraptured in a dangerous game, as the two challenge and taunt her bourgeois assumptions about the world. “You are the nihilist,” Mao tells Marcia. “Could you really spend your time talking crap, worried about the kind of things that happen here, in this hamburger microcosm? All of this is accidental, nothing more than the springboard to launch us back to what is important.” By the time Marcia joins Mao and Lenin in launching a violent attack on a supermarket, she may or may not be experiencing Stockholm syndrome, but there’s no doubt she is fundamentally changed.
Two unnerving, challenging stories about identity sparked by subtle delights and surprising ends.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2112-2
Page Count: 178
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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