A decent premise, but the story goes nowhere.
First published in France in 2002, Laurrent’s novel is the misshapen tale of a lecherous white-collar criminal who finds himself on a honeymoon with the boss’s sexy wife.
We first see Clovis Baccara leaving a Paris loft, telling his latest conquest emphatically that she was only a one-night stand. The 40-year-old Clovis, a sexual athlete who sometimes uses whores, has never married; the tenderness in marriage that grows as passion ebbs would disgust him. There was a time, 20 years before when he was a heavy drug user, that life itself disgusted him; he was saved from suicide by an ex-con, Oscar Lux, his neighbor in a fleabag hotel. Groomed by Oscar, Clovis has become his right-hand man, expertly laundering money for his crime empire. Now, attending Oscar’s wedding as his best man, he is undone by the beauty of the bride, Veronica, becoming as awkward as a teenager. One dance with her seals his infatuation, and his own “tragic outcome.” When Oscar is arrested the next day, he instructs Clovis to escort Veronica to their honeymoon hotel in Los Angeles; Oscar will join them later. Clovis, caught between the strength of his desire and his unwillingness to cuckold Oscar, tries to keep his distance from Veronica, an outrageous flirt; but this is not easily done, since he’s sleeping on a daybed outside her bedroom in the honeymoon suite. The author might have intended a sexual comedy or, more pretentiously, a fable about hubris and nemesis (it’s tricked out with classical references). Either way, it fails. Laurrent has no gift for narrative, pacing or characterization. Instead of character development, he gives us inventories: of rooms, hotel guests, boardwalk attractions. Too often he writes like someone who’s just swallowed a dictionary (“Woeful is the anaphora that all is but a hapax”). The stalemate between Clovis and Veronica ends abruptly, and Clovis fulfills his so-called tragic destiny soon after.
A decent premise, but the story goes nowhere.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56478-431-5
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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