The protagonist of one story, driven to the brink of madness by a friend’s shocking workplace death, wants “to write...
A collection of soul-grindingly bleak stories with the barest glimmers of human resilience.
The author of these stories (All Good Things Will Come from the Sea, 2014) makes Raymond Carver read like Anne Tyler. All of them are set in the harbor district of his native Athens, but this is no tourist’s Greece. It could be termed a working-class neighborhood, but many of the protagonists are no longer working, and their existence is barely hand-to-mouth, for too often there is nothing in the hand to reach the mouth. Sometimes their jobs have been lost to political upheaval, but there are no political solutions to their existential dilemmas, no party that is better than any other. Occasionally, characters believe that their plights will somehow capture the attention of the media. In the closing story, “Piece By Piece They’re Taking My World Away,” someone whose home has been lost to eminent domain says, “I’m sure they’ll say something on TV. That’s something, at least. At some point they’ll say something on TV for sure.” But the reader who has heard similar hopes from other characters here knows that there will be no media attention, at least not before the story ends, as they invariably do, without resolution, leaving the characters in limbo. Though the opening “Come on Ellie, Feed the Pig” evokes “the smell of the malicious poverty that is slowly and silently and confidently gnawing at Ellie’s dreams and strength and life,” her situation is better than most. She has some money, if not much, and the worst that seems to happen is a lover’s betrayal, as others have betrayed her previously. She hasn’t lost anyone close to her in a violent explosion, and there’s no sense that the next day she faces homelessness, joblessness, or starvation. So, she’s one of the lucky ones.
The protagonist of one story, driven to the brink of madness by a friend’s shocking workplace death, wants “to write something that would express unspeakable rage and hatred and love and despair all at once.” Such sentiments could be the writer’s own.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-914671-35-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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