Rambling but fascinating foray into little-charted territory: the trauma wrought by the Vietnam War on its “winners.”
In dissident Huong’s latest fiction set in postwar Vietnam (Beyond Illusions, 2001, etc.), a woman’s veteran husband, presumed dead, returns after a 14-year absence.
Mien leads an idyllic life in the rural village of Mountain Hamlet. Her second husband, Hoan, is a successful plantation owner and merchant who adores her and their son, Hanh. One day, however, Mien’s first husband, Bon, who left to go to war shortly after their marriage, turns up on the doorstep of Mien’s beloved house. His wartime ordeal has left Bon shattered, and the villagers, Communist administrators, and her own conscience pressure Mien into leaving Hoan and going back to live with Bon in his decrepit shack. (Mien never learns that Bon had married a Laotian woman during his wanderings.) Complicating matters is Bon’s sister Ta, a shiftless nymphomaniac with a brood of children who steal Bon’s meager possessions and food. The story alternates among Mien, Bon and Hoan as it recounts, in disjointed sections, Mien’s futile effort to readjust to the repellent, needy Bon, Bon’s horrific war experience (including an agonizing trek with the corpse of his beloved sergeant) and Hoan’s descent into a sordid world of urban prostitutes with a Mephistophelean friend as a guide. Lush description—a bit too metaphor-replete—makes the Vietnamese flora, fauna and cuisine enticingly real. Bon, aided by a coffee aphrodisiac, impregnates Mien. Though Mien, who still returns to her old home by day to care for her son, does not want to have the child, she gives birth to a deformed, stillborn infant, possibly as a result of Bon’s exposure to Agent Orange or her own attempts to induce a miscarriage. Despite much interior musing on matters of destiny and compulsion, the characters’ behavior often seems arbitrary and unmotivated. A provisionally happy ending redeems the principals, except for Bon, whose personal terrain will remain unpopulated: hence the title.
Rambling but fascinating foray into little-charted territory: the trauma wrought by the Vietnam War on its “winners.”Pub Date: April 13, 2005
ISBN: 1-4013-6664-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
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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