In his ambitious new version of an ancient classic, Vann sacrifices clarity for lyricism but falls short of both.
A retelling of the story of Medea and her exploits with Jason and the Argonauts.
Vann’s (Aquarium, 2015, etc.) newest work traverses well-trod territory: he’s taken Medea as his subject, the mythological character famous for, among other things, murdering her own children. Actually, the circumstances of those murders vary widely among the numerous ancient accounts. Maybe she hadn’t meant to kill them; maybe it was an accident; etc., etc. Vann manages to make the story his own. His book begins long before that infamous conclusion, with Medea’s flight from her homeland with Jason, seeker of the Golden Fleece, and his men, the Argonauts. Then there is their perilous journey back to Iolcus, where Jason’s cruel uncle, Pelias, is king. In Vann’s telling, Jason is too weak to usurp the throne, despite Medea’s urging, and the two end up enslaved for the next six years. There are other adventures, too, all of which are filtered through Medea’s singular consciousness. She’s prone to spectacular acts of violence. Before the book even begins, she’s hacked her brother to pieces. Vann relates all this in a prose style that aims for lyricism but rather quickly falls short of it. There’s a sameness to his sentences, an odd reluctance to use the verb “to be,” that quickly becomes tiresome. You long for a complete sentence. The fragments stack up: “White glare each morning an oblivion. Distance gone. Shape and shadow and being. Eyes without use, and this water an open desert with no refuge.” Unfortunately, Vann, a former Guggenheim fellow, is not at his best here. His fragments are interspersed with bits of dialogue that at times sound suspiciously contemporary: “Anyway,” Jason says to Medea at one point. “Leave me alone.” Soon after, brimful with rage and the desire for revenge, she thinks, “she will give him plenty to remember.”
In his ambitious new version of an ancient classic, Vann sacrifices clarity for lyricism but falls short of both.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2580-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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