Ambitious but diffuse.
Van Heerden offers a lyrical but underpowered interpretation of his country’s history as a young woman visits an isolated village that’s trapped in the past.
Relying on allegory and a labored magic realism, van Heerden (Ancestral Voices, 1992) tells a story both of the old South Africa and the new one, vital and optimistic about the future. Among the characters in the village of Yearsonend are ghostly ones from the past like Captain Gird, an English painter of South African wildlife in the early 19th century; his bushman guide, Slingshot X!am; the gold-obsessed General Taljaard, who has fought in all his country’s wars; and Granny Siela Pedi, who, after capture by Boer soldiers, fell in love with their leader, Field Cornet Pistorius. The flesh and blood inhabitants include a mute and blind Italian stonecutter, Mario Salviati, who came to the village during WWII; Jonty Jack Bergh, a sculptor; and Ingi Friedlander, a museum curator who is the daughter of Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Ingi has come to Yearsonend to persuade Jonty Jack to sell to her museum his famous statue, the Staggering Merman. Meanwhile, the villagers, spinners of myths and old tales, dream obsessively of finding the gold that Field Cornet Pistorius and the ostrich-feather Magnate Meerlust Bergh buried in 1902. Jonty’s father, Big Karel, who disappeared when his plan to bring water over the mountain seemed to have failed, may have discovered the gold and entrusted the knowledge to Salviati. As Ingi visits haunted houses like the Feather Palace, where Jonty’s mixed-race grandparents Meerlust and Indonesian Irene once lived, she befriends the aging Salviati, talks art with Jonty, and prepares to leave empty-handed. But first she watches the town’s gold mania reach fever pitch as Jonty blasts open a mountain cave where he believes father’s body lies and where the villagers believe the gold is hidden: a cathartic action that finally cuts the crippling ties to the past.
Ambitious but diffuse.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052973-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
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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