A creaky romance that lacks substance. But the book is an interactive-marketing goldmine: Readers can use codes to link up...
Metafiction in which a visiting American professor’s Parisian secretary makes sure that he finds a box of mementos, which lure him into researching the life of the box’s deceased owner.
The eponymous Parisian address happens to be the actual address where first-time novelist Shapiro lived as a child, downstairs from an actual woman named Louise Brunet, and the fictional life presented here is based on the real Brunet’s actual box of mementos, unclaimed after her death. The fictional professor Trevor Stratton begins to study the mementos, which range from photographs to letters to a rosary to bits of dried flowers, scanning them on his computer and writing his conjectures about them to someone he addresses only as “Sir.” The basic story that Trevor puts together is standard romantic melodrama. During World War I, Louise is romantically pursued by her cousin, who dies in battle before they can culminate their love. When Louise’s brother survives the war only to die from the 1918 flu epidemic, her otherwise loving and unremarkable father sexually attacks Louise in a fit of despondency—an act that makes sense only as a literary excuse for Louise to marry Henri Brunet, her father’s associate in his jewelry business. Louise, a part-time music teacher, cares for her gentle, less-than-passionate husband, but despite her best attempts remains childless. In 1928, an attractive couple with three sons, and another child on the way, move into the building, and Louise actively pursues an affair with the husband. Then Louise’s gifted adolescent music student declares her love for Louise. Overwhelmed, Louise goes away alone for a few days before returning home and recommencing her life. As he writes about Louise, Trevor makes it clear that he has fallen in love with Josianne, the woman who engineered his research, a character as unformed as Trevor himself.
A creaky romance that lacks substance. But the book is an interactive-marketing goldmine: Readers can use codes to link up to the book’s website.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-08328-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
