An intensely suspenseful psychological portrait—and with many more questions than answers.
A sobering tale of crime and the exhausting search for justice in its aftermath.
Following on his none-too-cheerful roman à clef The End of Eddy (2017), Louis again blends fact and fiction to report a crime: On Christmas Eve a few years ago, following a chance encounter, he was raped and nearly murdered in an episode that the police dossier blandly calls an “attempted homicide.” His first impulse after the act is to clean his apartment obsessively, especially anything his attacker might have touched. “I couldn’t stop,” he writes. “I was possessed by an almost manic energy. I thought: Better crazy than dead.” As if rejoining Camus, Louis circles again and again to the scene and facts of the assault, and with all his predecessor’s matter-of-factness. In a particularly telling reverie, Louis imagines approaching a stranger in a supermarket and telling that person the story, which “would be so ugly he’d have no choice but to stand there and listen till the end.” In essence, that is the whole point of this lapel-grabbing narrative; it is slender but altogether powerful, unsparing in detail and not without sympathy for the people who are caught up in it, the reader included. Even the police, who are none too helpful throughout, catch a break; when they snicker at his story, it is mostly out of shock, though after a time, with their endless questioning, the cops all blend together: “I no longer saw the bodies of men and women, only repetitions that had taken on the bodies of women and men.” No such lack of specificity for the attacker, who, Louis is sure, is bound to strike again, all the more reason for Louis to keep a box cutter in his pocket at all times “in case [he] was hiding and waiting.”
An intensely suspenseful psychological portrait—and with many more questions than answers.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-17059-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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