Overall, great fun, in a sardonic sort of way.
A spare gothic jewel from Tanning (Between Lives, 2001), the Illinois-born artist and writer best known for her affiliation with the Surrealist school.
Seven-year-old Destina Meridian is the descendant of a woman tried as a witch in Massachusetts in 1692, and she has a nascent sort of witchiness herself. She lives at Windcote, a ranch in the Arizona desert, with her eccentric father and Nelly, her “governess” (also one of her father’s playmates in his “laboratory” of erotic effects). Raoul Meridian likes having new playmates: hence this weekend’s houseguests—Raoul’s trusty “chameleon,” Ridder; Ralph Vine, a noted public relations man; his date, Maya, an actress on the wane; Chi Chi, a model who needs his magic touch; and finally Nadine, a beautiful (natch) Cajun on the Hollywood scene, with her fiancé Albert, who are sent to separate bedrooms once they arrive. For starters, Raoul convinces Nadine to cut off her long blond hair (one of his fetishes). Albert finds himself wandering through the house, where he encounters young Destina, who shows him her “memory box” filled with objects of surpassing strangeness—“the claws and tails of gila monsters, skins of reptiles, spotted eggs, even single eyes preserved in tiny jars”—and describes the friend in the canyon, probably a lion, who brings them to her. After a rousing dinner party, the main characters follow perilous pathways to their fates. The first four are picked up by a car in the predawn hours and head back to New York. The rest are not so lucky. Albert lures Nadine into the desert in search of the lion, and Raoul is left behind with Nelly. Tanning lived near Sedona in the mid-1940s after her marriage to Max Ernst, and she describes the desert with poetic precision. While her plot wavers at times, she concludes with a series of truly gruesome set pieces and a final moment of grace.
Overall, great fun, in a sardonic sort of way.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-584-9
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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