Pretentious and overwrought.
American coed abandons her “too-safe life” at Princeton to study dance and decadence in Tokyo.
Any book that opens with the image of a woman “laid out like a sacrifice on a long, low-to-the ground dining table, her naked body littered with sushi” clearly intends to shock, and Gralla’s debut tale revels throughout in extreme behavior. Narrator Liza comes to Japan to study butoh, “the dance of utter darkness,” because it seems “the one thing that might be outrageous enough to save me.” She gets a job at a hostess club, luring salarymen to buy overpriced drinks, and acquires a lover who declares, “I will chain you naked to the stone steps on my tower and torture you in the most intimate part of yourself.” Fellow hostess Maboroshi invites Liza to join a band of maiko, apprentice geishas who wear the traditional kimonos as they maraud through the Tokyo streets at night. It was Maboroshi on the table in the first scene, and soon Liza too is a live serving platter, though she herself has stopped eating. When her American boyfriend turns up, Liza bops him over the head with a vase, lets the maiko cut her arms with glass and watches them kill a club patron, then passes out at her butoh group’s dress rehearsal. It’s all supposedly very significant, with Liza pontificating about becoming a commodity, wondering which is her authentic self, and slathering on the floating metaphors. (The phrase “floating world” describes the walled quarters inhabited by geisha.) Hardly any of it is believable except the authentically detailed hostess club scenes (the author worked at one) and some interesting interpolations about butoh’s origins in the Tokyo student riots of 1959. Otherwise, the lurid developments seem merely the result of feverish invention, and Liza’s banal philosophizing (“my messier bodily fluids were blotted out by the paper-thin origami of my soul”) just irritating.
Pretentious and overwrought.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45291-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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