The condition of Chile under the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet is given savage and amusing expression here: the first English translation of a novel (originally published in 1988) by the author of Sacred Cow (see below—In Brief). Eltit's title adopts the phrase currently descriptive of the realm inhabited by disadvantaged aliens adrift in otherwise settled societies—but may also allude to the space initially shared by her (literal) twin narrators: their mother's womb, before they're born. In the first of matching narratives, ``he'' describes their conception, then their jealous enmity in utero, where ``she'' is positioned awkwardly—and, we may be sure, symbolically—beneath him (``I evaded her, of course, keeping as much distance between us a possible''). Through such humorously stiff, self-consciously paternalistic language, Eltit offers amusing pictures of the rivalry of baby brother and sister (while she manages to speak the first word, it's he who takes the first step), and of their dull- witted father's knee-jerk machismo (he mounts their unwilling mother even as she lies in bed consumed with fever). In the sister's subsequent narrative, tone and content change drastically. The birth of a favored younger sister drives the twins closer together, as does their apprehension of a hungry, menacing exterior world that looms just beyond their insular domestic comfort and threatens to snatch it away. As their bodies incestuously commingle, not only are the barriers between the two broken down but their family also becomes increasingly fragmented—as reflected in the increasing discordance and shrillness of the text. All of this comprises a superb metaphor for the political struggles in Chile, worked out with ingenious comic detail and marred only by a climactic, repetitive emphasis on visceral and strident sexuality that seems to be Eltit's signal weakness as a writer. For all that, a clever and original work that takes deadly aim at its several richly deserving targets.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-8032-1817-6
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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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