A frustrating novel that strains to take on metaphysical questions and the New York art scene.
A successful New York artist, disenchanted with his hedonistic lifestyle and the contemporary art world, begins to lose touch with reality.
Debut novelist Zapata, a contemporary artist born in Spain, invites the reader to follow along as Rodrigo Concepción’s extravagant and debauched life unravels. Part critique of the contemporary art world and part philosophical inquiry into the meaning of life, this novel takes on more than it can chew. It opens in a SoHo loft with 49-year-old Rodrigo hung over and being served his daily “survival kit”—coffee, painkiller, marijuana, and omega-3 pills—by his butler while another of his employees rushes to get him ready for his flight to Art Basel. Besides his staff, Rodrigo’s friends include a billionaire and a pimp. Both attend Art Basel with him, but to Rodrigo everything—the drugs, the alcohol, the art (which is hardly mentioned), the models—is empty and disgusting. Soon after, he has an "amazing and life-changing series of dreams" in which he's in Florence and meets a woman named Carlotta, whom he calls “an ideal and a perfect creation of my mind.” The self-described “matador of art” becomes obsessed with Carlotta and his dream world, shucking his responsibilities and renouncing his old life (the “New York-life nightmare”). What follows is confusing, and it’s unclear whether or not the lack of certainty is intentional. Rodrigo’s character tells more than Zapata shows when it comes to major plot points or themes: “This was my journey, and it had been necessary for me to get to the next level of understanding” or “I’m sensitive. Thoughtful. I’m a divo sometimes, because of my fame and the fact that I can get away with almost anything, but deep inside...I am still humble and my heart is pure.” Rodrigo is unlikable and less self-aware than he’s meant to be, especially when making sweeping statements about women or cringeworthy jokes at the expense of the LGBTQ community.
A frustrating novel that strains to take on metaphysical questions and the New York art scene.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2925-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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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