An unusually miscellaneous miscellany aptly described by its subtitle: marginal work from the late author who became the leading American short-story writer in the 70's. Barthelme the humorist is the preeminent figure on display here, whether in extended parodies and satires (``The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge,'' ``And Now Let's Hear It for the Ed Sullivan Show!'', ``Bunny Image, Loss of: The Case of Bitsy S.''); unsigned columns from the New Yorker's ``Notes and Comment'' pages; collages of old engravings shanghaied into ludicrously inappropriate narratives (``A Nation of Wheels,'' ``The Educational Experience,'' ``The Dassaud Prize''); or three formerly unpublished plays (``The Friends of the Family,'' ``The Conservatory,'' ``Snow White''). The revelation is how adept Barthelme was at recycling material for use in columns, sketches, stories, and plays—as indicated here by Herzinger's notes. The disappointments are, first, the slightness and datedness of so much of the material—parodies like ``That Cosmopolitan Girl'' and ``L'Lapse'' have dated almost as badly as their targets, and three plays mostly demonstrate why Barthelme was well-advised to give them up—and, second, the large number of reprints from earlier collections (31 of 63 pieces; Barthelme's 1974 miscellany Guilty Pleasures is picked particularly clean). The unpicked plums (a New Yorker interview with King Tut, a profile of artistic baseball greats T. S. Eliot, Django Reinhardt, Susan Sontag, Willem de Kooning, and Piet Mondrian) are few and far between; time and again, the pieces that most please turn out to be from Come Back, Dr. Caligari or Overnight to Many Distant Cities. Even minor Barthelme is better than no Barthelme. A few savory hints here whet the appetite for more: a promised collection of essays and interviews, another of uncollected stories. (Copiously illustrated with loopy prints, not seen but fondly remembered.)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-679-40982-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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