Though Benjamin can turn a nice phrase, this is an uneven first novel.
Dream researchers probe the subconscious, moral responsibility and the power of dreams on waking life.
Sylvie narrates the story of her entanglement with Adrian Keller, a renegade researcher interested in lucid dreaming, and his acolyte, Gabe. Keller is the headmaster at Mills, a prep school in Northern California (having mysteriously left his university position), and Gabe is part of a group of quick-witted teenage students. Sylvie and Gabe become inseparable, though she tries to ignore his suspicious comings and goings from Keller’s cottage. And then, without explanation, Gabe leaves school and vanishes from Sylvie’s life until her final year at UC Berkeley. He begins stalking her, and when she confronts him, he asks the unthinkable—that she drop out of college and work with him as a research assistant at Keller’s sleep institute. Sylvie is still in love with Gabe, so the two work with Keller on Martha’s Vineyard, then at Fort Bragg and finally in the neuroscience department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. People with serious sleep disorders—sleepwalking and night terrors—come to learn lucid dreaming in hopes that the lucidity will help end their dangerous behaviors. In Madison they are neighbors to a flirty Finnish couple, academics who question the ethics of their research; they suggest that a person’s knowledge of his or her deepest self can be treacherous. Unfortunately, none of this is as compelling or mysterious as Sylvie’s narrative tries to make it sound. Further impairing the novel are the frequent chronological shifts used to build suspense; the flipping back and forth merely muddles the plot. As Sylvie begins to question Keller’s work, she discovers the sordid truth about everything, but the twist at the end is hardly shocking enough to excuse the slow buildup.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 9781476761169
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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