About 40 percent of what should have been a terrific novel.
The death of a child commits his grieving father to a pilgrimage of scholarly investigation in this brooding 11th novel from the veteran NBA-nominated author (American Ghosts, 2005, etc.).
During one of their lakeside summers, college French language teacher Gerard Chauvin overrules his wife Peggy’s fears by granting their six-year-old Harry’s insistent wish to explore a long-abandoned old house now “occupied” only by mischief-making teenagers. Harry falls through rotted floorboards (possibly concealed to rig a trap) to his death, and Gerard finds his own painful injuries easier to bear than the overload of guilt and sorrow that subsequently burdens his every waking moment. He clings compulsively to a scrap of paper filled with “mysterious writing,” picked up seconds before Harry died, and, as he draws farther away from Peggy’s efforts to rebuild their lives, a perhaps unanswerable question nags at him: Is there meaning, a possible bulwark against debilitating grief, in the structural arrangements of languages (e.g., in the symbols on that piece of paper, soon identified as the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet)? Determined to move beyond the meaninglessness of his son’s death, Gerard leaves Peggy and, while dreamily seeking linguistic “interconnections,” meets an Asian-American woman still mourning her daughter’s suicide, and impulsively travels with her to London and a meeting with a learned philologist who can presumably answer questions both coincidentally share about language’s elusiveness and arbitrariness. This stretches credibility considerably, as do ensuing encounters with a Sephardic Jew whose wife was killed by Greek terrorists and a similarly bereaved Chechnyan woman. The novel’s ending, in the ruins of what was formerly Hadrian’s Library (to which Gerard is escorted by a guide possibly sent by the dead), is as lovely and haunting as are its stunning opening chapters. Everything in between is, alas, numbingly discursive, turgid and redundant—albeit quite beautifully written.
About 40 percent of what should have been a terrific novel.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-42461-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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