Shafak’s infectious, earnest exuberance is used here to better effect than it has been recently; her portrait of a woman in...
Through the story of a cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class Turkish woman coming to terms with her life, Shafak (The Architect’s Apprentice, 2015, etc.) meshes many of the themes she has explored separately in her previous novels: Turkish politics, spiritualism, and the uneasy relationship between East and West.
In 2016 Istanbul, 35-year-old Peri is en route with her surly 12-year-old daughter to a dinner party when a beggar tries to rob her. As Peri successfully fights off her attacker (possibly with help from a guardian angel), an old photograph falls from her purse, a forgotten Polaroid of Peri standing with three others at Oxford. That photograph continues to tug at her memories when she eventually arrives at the dinner party, a party that may remind film aficionados of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. As course after course is served in the ostentatiously beautiful home, Peri observes her well-heeled fellow guests while she reconsiders her past. She spent an unhappy childhood caught in the cross hairs between her protective, devout mother and her heavy-drinking but adored secularist father, an Atatürk devotee. Unable to decide what she believed, bookworm Peri searched for a path between belief and disbelief. Supported by her father, she attended Oxford in 2000; her intellectual, spiritual, and emotional lives there centered on the others in that photograph: Egyptian-American Mona, a Muslim feminist who wore her headscarf as a choice; Shirin, an aggressively secular, joyful Iranian; and professor Azur, whose controversial course, “Entering the Mind of God/God of the Mind,” had a profound effect on all his students and especially inspired but confused Peri. In 2016, listening to self-absorbed dinner-party chatter expressing a cross-section of Turkish attitudes about nationalism, capitalism, and Islam, Peri decides to face the act of betrayal she committed at Oxford before it’s too late.
Shafak’s infectious, earnest exuberance is used here to better effect than it has been recently; her portrait of a woman in existential crisis feels universal, shining clarifying light on Islam—and religious spirituality in general—within the frame of today’s world.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-995-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing...
Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.
Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef. And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from a Taliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending.
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of Afghan culture too: irresistible.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-245-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
SEEN & HEARD
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