A novel that can be read in a single sitting of less than two hours might continue to resonate with readers for weeks,...
This slim debut novel distills the essence of life and love, once a British husband and wife learn that he has a month or less to live.
Imagine Erich Segal’s Love Story rewritten by Nicholson Baker and transplanted to England. The protagonists are sort of an Everycouple, with nothing very exceptional about themselves, their lives or their fate. An advertising man who is creative but not deeply reflective, Ambrose Zephyr learns as he approaches 50 that he has a fatal, incurable and unnamed disease. His wife, Zappora “Zipper” Ashkenazi, who writes about books for a semi-popular fashion magazine, complements him emotionally as well as alphabetically. The two have no children and apparently need nothing beyond each other and their routines to make their lives full. Ambrose’s diagnosis seems to hit Zipper harder than it does him. He knows that he must readjust, to deal with “days that until moments before had been assumed would stretch to years. With luck, to decades. Not shrink to weeks.” He immediately devises a plan for those dwindling days. Obsessed with the alphabet since childhood, he will use it to plan an itinerary, a letter per day: Amsterdam, Berlin, Chartres. Zipper agrees, anticipating Paris and Venice, yet driven to distraction or denial by her husband’s impending death. After the scene-setting, the novel threatens to become a little too rote, a little too alphabetically cute. Yet Richardson’s prose is precise and often poetic, devoid of sentimental treacle, and the narrative deepens thematically as the couple discovers that it is as hard to plan neatly for death as it is for life. A climactic twist casts new light on the preceding narrative, and some might be tempted to start the novel all over again upon finishing.
A novel that can be read in a single sitting of less than two hours might continue to resonate with readers for weeks, months, even years.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52255-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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
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
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