A rambling satire that fails to clearly identify its targets.
Whatever happened to sex? A married right-wing Catholic rediscovers chastity in this slow tease of a novel from the Italian author.
At some point after 9/11, a young Roman called Piero Rosini returned to the religion of his childhood. “[F]ear of the Apocalypse, together with an immense need of love, restored [him] to the flock of the eternal children of Jesus.” There is no elaboration of this moment, though it drives the novel. Piero didn’t just get right with Jesus, he championed sexual abstinence. As for his fiancee, Alice, “our engagement had been desexed, by mutual agreement.” When we first meet Piero in Rome, now married and pushing 30, it’s late 2005. He’s an editor at a right-wing Catholic publishing house marked by a “sophisticated anti-Semitism” that will flower with its forthcoming book The Jewish Pope, a bizarre take on John Paul II. In a jarring transition, but with the support of his wife, Alice, who chooses to stay behind, Piero moves to Paris to work for a similarly reactionary publisher. Sampling the night life, he meets four “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians), young women who talk dirty, do drugs and sleep around. Despite himself, Piero is intrigued by them, especially by Clelia, who’s Jewish, and her uncle Leo, who makes Piero his protégé, Judaizing him, calling him Rosenzweil. The Italian stays chaste, however, passing up many opportunities to make love to the more than willing Clelia, and what might have been the entertaining story of a prude undone by Parisian fleshpots is something less: a portrait of a passive, pampered individual unable to resolve his conflicts. Though Pacifico makes a show of using four-letter words, he won’t write about sex. When the long-suffering, barely characterized Alice visits Paris and makes love to her husband, the astonishing development is dismissed in a sentence. It’s no surprise that the closing section is a chaotic cop-out.
A rambling satire that fails to clearly identify its targets.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-27044-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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