Despite the Dumas-like twists and the hairpin curves of coincidence, a tale narrated with the insistent momentum of a good...
An English translation of Osorio’s award-winning novel about a woman’s struggle to learn the identity of her parents and the mystery of her birth and adoption during Argentina’s “dirty war.”
In the years after a junta took over Argentina (in 1976), some 30,000 political prisoners “disappeared.” One macabre feature of this dread period was that pregnant prisoners were relatively well-treated up to their delivery—then were killed, their children adopted by high-ranking officials. One such orphan is Luz, whose mother, Liliana, had been part of an underground leftist group. Luz’s adoptive mother, Marianna, had given birth to a stillborn child in the same hospital, on the same night Luz was born. Marianna’s father, the dreaded Colonel Alfonso Dufau, sees the hand of fate in the coincidence and promptly orders that Luz be given to Marianna and the stillborn recorded as Liliana’s. The hospital authorities are bribed to comply, Marianna is never told the truth, and Luz grows up in complete ignorance of her true identity. The only flaw in the Colonel’s plan was Miriam Lopez. A sometime prostitute engaged to one of the Colonel’s henchmen, the childless Miriam was the one who’d originally been promised Liliana’s baby, and was later asked to help care for it (and Liliana) until Marianna (who had gone into a coma after her delivery) was released from the hospital. When Miriam learned that Liliana was to be executed as soon as she returned to prison, she tried to help her escape, but they were caught, Liliana was killed, Miriam fled Argentina, and Luz was raised as Marianna’s daughter. Years later, however, Miriam contacts Luz and tells her the truth. Luz then goes about the complicated process of searching for her father, who is still alive, and telling him the story of her life.
Despite the Dumas-like twists and the hairpin curves of coincidence, a tale narrated with the insistent momentum of a good detective story.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2003
ISBN: 1-58234-182-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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