An engaging tale, simply told and with a measure of wit: a high-end soap opera to be enjoyed and forgotten. Take it to the...
A second romantic potboiler from Marciano (Rules of the Wild, 1998), who returns to her native Italy to imagine what perils and joys could be experienced in three generations of a Mediterranean family.
Casa Rossa, as narrator Alina Strada tells us, was painted red by her grandfather Lorenzo in cold rage after his wife Renee abandoned him (and her daughter Alba) for another woman and went with her to live in Nazi Germany. Lorenzo, an artist, had painted a giant mural of Renee on one of the exterior walls and needed a dark color to obliterate it. The house remained in the Strada family for more than 70 years, but when it was sold, in the 1990s, Alina went to clean it for the new owners. Naturally, she came across a great many mementos that brought back the story of her brilliant and unhappy family. In the 1950s, her mother Alba, who grew up in Casa Rossa, married the famous screenwriter Oliviero Strada and enjoyed with him the dolce vita of Roman celebrity—until Oliviero was found dead, whether through suicide or murder. Very soon after, Alba married a shady businessman named Bruno, and Alina and her sister Isabella retreated from this unhappy new family into private worlds of their own: Alina to heroin, Isabella to the Red Brigades. When Alina eventually overcame her addiction, she moved to New York and fell in love with journalist Daniel Moore. By then, Isabella had been sent to prison, but Daniel publicized her case so widely that her verdict was overturned. Then it became apparent that Daniel’s interest in Isabella was more than professional. No such thing as a happy ending? Well, when was the last time you saw an Italian opera with one?
An engaging tale, simply told and with a measure of wit: a high-end soap opera to be enjoyed and forgotten. Take it to the beach.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42123-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
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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