A novel at once both sensuous and terrifying.
Marciano (Casa Rossa, 2002, etc.) explores the fractured political landscape of contemporary war-torn Kabul.
Two women—Maria Galante, a photographer and also the narrator, and Imo Glass, a freelance writer—go on a mission to Afghanistan to chronicle one of the unforeseen consequences of war: women who are forced into marriages and who have dealt with this social tradition by attempting to kill themselves by self-immolation. Imo is an experienced and rather cynical observer of the human condition, while Maria has recently been spending her time doing artistic renditions of asparagus quiche for glossy magazines; however, she’s sucked into the maelstrom of a country with a terrible beauty but also with unimaginable social issues. The first third of the novel follows Maria as she takes a training course to help her deal with eventualities she might have to face during her visit to Kabul. She must, for example, learn survival skills to help her deal with the possibility of being kidnapped. After this bracing plunge into political reality, she and Imo find themselves in Kabul, assisted by their driver (and sometime translator) Hanif, a gentle man who’s simply trying to stay alive and make ends meet while his pregnant wife prepares to give birth. Imo is at first the hard-as-nails reporter willing to go to any length to get her story, while Maria is more timid and dewy-eyed. After a disquieting journey to the fierce countryside outside of Kabul, however, both women get into a frightening situation that threatens to spin out of control. This allows Maria to show her strength while Imo is reduced to whimpering, her toughness shown to be a mask covering a more vulnerable self. Toward the end of the novel Maria is told her story needs “a strong image of a suffering, beautiful woman,” and ironically the only image Maria is able to produce is of Hanif’s dying wife.
A novel at once both sensuous and terrifying.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42510-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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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