Futuristic satire with a scattershot approach: Benard (Moghul Buffet, 1998) targets everything from goddess worship and...
In Benard's brave new world, feminists rule—and foolish romantic fantasies aren't allowed.
But why, then, did they hold such power once upon a time? To find out, Lisa, a young researcher in the Ministry of Thought, plows through reams of literature from a less enlightened but much more entertaining era. She's naïve enough to believe that state-sanctioned sexuality might actually be worthwhile. Or that, at least, is what the officials of the feminist government want her to believe. Yet Lisa can't deny the arousing effects of her research material—not that she'd admit it to her higher-ups. She does her best to ignore all those merely physical sensations, until she and her dedicated assistant Justin are recruited to infiltrate Harmony, a radical group dedicated to overthrowing the feminist ruling class. The two attend meetings on both sides of the ideological divide, becoming more confused than ever. Lisa sneaks out to an underground dance and hears, for the first time, dumb pickup lines, something utterly astonishing to a young woman who was 11 years old when the Revolution began. The sexually charged gyrations she witnesses alarm and excite her, and the female officials electronically monitoring her begin to fear for her sanity. The all-powerful state, however, has safeguards to protect itself: a hidden feature in the unremovable wristbands that all males must wear will keep them (those chest-beating dopes, unable to figure anything out on their own) well under control. Thus, Harmony and other cells of the counterrevolutionary movement are readily eliminated and life goes on as before. Justin, one of the rare good guys, gets a new medal or two, while Lisa is rewarded with another assistant and continues her oh-so-stimulating research for the good of all.
Futuristic satire with a scattershot approach: Benard (Moghul Buffet, 1998) targets everything from goddess worship and holistic healing to the self-righteous excesses of 1970s-style feminism, enlivening her somewhat cerebral style with plenty of erotic snippets.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-28178-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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