A gonzo record of a large life.
A Spanish dwarf recounts his life and times even as they're coming to an end.
“I’ve known an endless string of bastards in my lifetime and not wished a single one a bad end.” So begins this neo-baroque saga as the dwarf Gregorio, aka Goyito, addresses the reader directly, narrating his life from a brutal childhood as the son of a whore to his prosperity in his elderly years. It’s a rambling and gritty tale underpinned by Gregorio's arch sense of humor and the profane poetry of his language. His childhood is marked by the death of his brother and endless abuse based on his appearance. After his mother dies, our hero joins the circus, where his lush voice describes the garish theatricality of the scene while showing how his survivor's mentality is forged out of adversity. Driven out after decades in service as a clown, he makes his way to Madrid in the early 1970s, as revolution and violence fill the air. At the bidding of his only friend, a one-eyed beggar, he becomes embedded with communist revolutionaries. As time goes on, he not only informs on them, but ultimately betrays their leader in a sinister reversal, taking everything she has at the end of her life. This is a vastly entertaining tale told by a remarkably resilient raconteur. Gregorio believes in fate the way some people believe in God, and while he believes his own path is set, it doesn’t disrupt the drama and tension of the tale. “Everything is written in the ineffable book of destiny, my life’s a closed chapter, and it’s your job to bring it to an end,” he proclaims. “The most hurtful violence that can be inflicted on a human being is the revelation of his lack of freedom, the predictability of his behavior, the exact outcome of his acts, even the exact date of his death. You have come here to amuse yourself with mine.”
A gonzo record of a large life.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-84-943658-9-8
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Hispabooks
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
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