The low-key narrative takes a while to build enough momentum to sustain reader interest, but once immersed in its leisurely...
Winner of the 2010 Governor General’s Award, Warren’s U.S. debut limns two nights and a single summer day in a tiny Canadian town.
In spare, quietly lyrical prose, Warren tracks the inhabitants of several households in Juliet (population 1,011). Lee Torgeson, 26, isn’t sure he’s capable of managing the farm left to him by his adoptive parents. Willard Shoenfeld and his brother’s widow, Marian, share a home and continue to run the Desert Drive-In movie theater, but Willard is afraid Marian is planning to leave; he can’t admit to himself how much he loves her, and he’s unaware she shares those feelings. Blaine Dolson has lost most of his family’s farmland and faces bankruptcy; he’s maddened by the distracted, easygoing ways of wife Vicki, who seems to let their six children mostly run wild. Blaine is only one of the borrowers whose on-the-brink finances worry tenderhearted banker Norval Birch, who is also troubled by wife Lila’s plans for an elaborate wedding for their pregnant daughter Rachelle. Add to this mix an out-of-towner who has lost the Arabian horse she impulsively bought en route to see her formerly estranged daughter and the grandchildren she’s never met; good-natured trucker Hank Trass, who takes her cell number and promises to keep an eye out; his jealous wife, Lynn, who finds the number and is sure Hank is cheating; plus the local hairdresser, whose cousin stabbed his own mother and whose father is a drunk—it adds up to the traditional cast of quirky characters that frequently animate tales of small-town life. Warren gives it her own twist with humor as dry as the sand dunes of the Little Snake Hills that border Juliet and with gentle compassion for her characters, who have their share of troubles but are all essentially decent, caring folks.
The low-key narrative takes a while to build enough momentum to sustain reader interest, but once immersed in its leisurely rhythms, most will find this an engaging snapshot of rural life.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15799-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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
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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