Harington's eighth novel (The Choiring of the Trees, 1991, etc.) a literary tour de force that purports to be the story of a Russian ÇmigrÇe who writes bestselling and critically acclaimed novels and who also has a taste for preadolescent boys. Ekatarina (aka V. Kelian) arrives in the US with her cardboard suitcase, then moves into a big faculty house filled with ghosts, drunks, and ``a polished buffet truly covered with bottles of all sizes and shapes.'' For the rest of the novel, Harington takes us on a magical mystery tour, and what begins as an odd story about eccentrics becomes a sendup of literary culture. In the beginning, Ekatarina teaches at the Cathedral of Learning (she's an expert on mushrooms), trades stories with the house's inhabitants, and seduces 12-year-old Kenny, the son of Big Kenny or Pa, who, at 71, is the retired professor and house-owner. There are word games, parodies, and even a discussion about narrative technique, as well as an epistle dated 2021 recorded from beyond the grave. Then Ekaterina moves to Stick Around, where she lives in the Halfmoon Hotel. Once her first novel, Georgia Boy (she's from the Georgian republic), hits the bestseller lists—thanks to a long New York Review of Books piece (included in its entirety)—she finds fame, fortune, and more prepubescents, not to mention glorious sex with a hillbilly actor. Meanwhile, Morris, her cat, speaks; her editor is attacked by a former Russian (shades of Rushdie here); and finally she's killed by a Paris Review ``Art of Fiction'' interviewer—the mother of one of Ekaterina's prepubescents. (The interview and an afterword by the book's supposed editor complete the novel.) Grand entertainment from an author who's been too little known for too long: perhaps this zany homage to Nabokov (especially Lolita) will bring deserved attention to Harington's impressive body of work.
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-15-128122-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
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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