Cleanly written and informed but worthy of a broader psychological canvas.
A woman lives as a man to escape oppression in her native Albania, but switching back after coming to the United States proves tricky.
As the novel opens, Mark has arrived in America shortly after 9/11, taken in by a cousin in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and ready to start fresh. Landing a job and improving his English are less crucial, though, than deciding how to resume life as a woman, Hana. In Albania, Hana was a literature student until her aunt died and she was forced to leave school to care for her ailing uncle. The uncle was insistent on arranging a marriage for her, and she resisted by opting to live as a man—a choice rooted in Albanian custom, as acclaimed novelist Ismail Kadare explains in the foreword. The switch is acceptable as long as Hana remains a virgin, and though the setup promisingly raises themes of national and sexual identity, the novel feels like a missed opportunity. Dones provides plenty of flashbacks to Hana’s early life in Albania, yet little time is spent on the 15 years she spent as a man and the tensions it created for her; a diary from that time is repeatedly mentioned but readers are denied a peek into it. Present-time difficulties are raised—spats with her cousin, going on dates, becoming comfortable with sex—but smoothly resolved, flouting the intensity of the struggle Hana says she’s endured. That’s disappointing, since early in the novel Dones smartly demonstrates how easily a woman’s standing in Albania can be diminished; Hana’s literary ambitions in particular were dismissed if not considered suspect. And Dones’ dialogue has plenty of casual wit, especially when Hana tries to explain her gender switch to her cousin’s young daughter. But the main drama feels curiously small for such a provocative theme.
Cleanly written and informed but worthy of a broader psychological canvas.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-908276-34-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: & Other Stories
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
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
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