A gracefully wrought reflection on identity within exile.
Australian author Sallis (Hiam, 1998, etc.) gives a powerful take on the ferocity of mother love as she tracks a young woman’s flight from her island home to Yemen to absorb a new language and culture.
Lian is the daughter of Vietnamese refugee Phi-Van, a so-called “silkie” who appeared almost miraculously from the sea and married Nev, whose farming family had lived for generations on the South Australian island off the coast of Adelaide. Aloof, suspicious Phi-Van, cut off from her past, forms a strange, unsettled relationship with her reserved daughter built on mutual distrust and jealousy: Lian strangles her mother’s beloved puppy when she recognizes the dog gets more loving attention from Phi-Van than she does. As Lian grows up, cocooned on the island, she’s afflicted by her mother’s poisonous, unhappy spirit and takes off to study Arabic in Yemen, believing that to thrive she needs to assume a new identity and never come back. While Lian immerses herself in the strange new culture of Sanaa, where women are rendered publicly invisible by having to don the lugubrious hijab and balto, she cherishes the holy spirit of the ancient language of the Koran and finds welcome communal closeness among the women, whose festive mingling at private parties reminds her of frolicking sea lions she used to watch while diving. She also meets a young religious student, Ibrahim, who truly loves her. Yet even in exile Lian is pursued by the devouring spirit of her mother, who will not be appeased until Lian reckons with her memories: “the wet slap slap slap of Vietnam, the spaces and faces she had never let in.” Peppered throughout the narrative are episodes involving Abdallah from Arabian Nights, reflecting the ageless nature of an ancient culture, though Sallis’s work is strong and evocative enough without them.
A gracefully wrought reflection on identity within exile.Pub Date: April 26, 2005
ISBN: 1-86508-617-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
