An elegant meditation on the passage of time and its discontents.
Young Brazilian novelist and translator Galera (Blood-Drenched Beard, 2015) returns with a slender tale of yearning and memory.
The difference between men and boys, the old witticism has it, is the price of their toys. As our story opens, a 10-year-old boy goes tearing around his Brazilian city on a much-hacked bicycle, a self-designated “elite urban cyclist” who rockets across the landscape while avoiding cars and impediments such as “an unfinished cement wall whose surface looks as though bits of human skin and flesh would adhere to it nicely.” The decades pass, and now our boy—who has made good in life while avoiding trouble as assiduously as he did that wall—has been goaded into one great adventure, scaling an unclimbed Andean peak in the company of a childhood friend. The challenge steers him into a trip down Memory Lane, revisiting kids bearing names such as Walrus, Mononucleosis, and Chrome Black. Walrus, for one, now has a dignified name, a fat wallet, and an impossibly beautiful wife, but others haven’t made out so well—and one didn’t make it out of childhood at all, in a scarring episode that puts a dark edge on any pleasant nostalgia. Galera guides his story skillfully into and out of past and present, capturing the geeky pleasures of what is now ancient technology (“It’s a 386 DX. With thirty-three megahertz and four megabytes of RAM memory”) and the touching vulnerability of young people who think they’re immortal, as opposed to adults who are afraid of their own shadows. The storyline as such is a little thin, but Galera’s larger theme would seem to be how we reckon with the things we’ve done and seen, how we negotiate the roads not taken and deal with our mountains of regrets (our protagonist having just “walked out on an atmosphere of marital acrimony that could have been resolved quickly with a little compassion and a few well-chosen words”).
An elegant meditation on the passage of time and its discontents.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59420-548-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
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
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