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ME, YOU

De Luca writes like a dream, passionately but not effusively, and he treats his characters with both respect and affection.

De Luca lovingly, even rapturously, explores familiar territory with bittersweet romanticism.

The unnamed narrator is 16, smack in the middle of adolescence and spending the summer with his uncle on an island off the Neapolitan coast in the 1950s. His primary adult mentor, however, is Nicola, who fishes the uncle’s boat and goes about his daily tasks with taciturn placidity. The narrator develops a strong interest in, almost an obsession with, Italy’s role in World War II, and feels the adults in his family have some explaining to do. Meanwhile, a girl enters his life, in this case Caia, an orphan of Yugoslav descent now in boarding school in Switzerland and visiting a friend for the summer. Despite Nicola’s cautions, the narrator becomes smitten, even when he finds out she’s Jewish—in fact, in his eyes that increases both her exoticism and her appeal. As the summer progresses, the narrator and Caia develop a relationship, warm but nonsexual. While at first she’s sensitive about her heritage, eventually she allows him to pronounce her name “Chaiele,” with a decidedly Hebrew inflection. She also acknowledges the protective role he plays in her life by calling him Tateh, the name she had formerly used for her father. The narrator’s cousin Daniele, a few years older, is another role model for the narrator, especially when he gets in a brawl that comes about when some German tourists visiting the island start singing an anthem of the SS. The epiphany the narrator gets from this incident leads him to his own act of protest and destruction.

De Luca writes like a dream, passionately but not effusively, and he treats his characters with both respect and affection.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-59051-47-9-5

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

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THINGS FALL APART

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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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

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