An amiably diverting account of domestic chaos, but nothing more.
The last of a trilogy (Portofino, 1992; Saving Grandma, 1997), this set in 1966, about the mixed-up childhood of Calvin Becker, whose parents were missionaries working to save the Swiss.
At 14, Calvin Becker has more to get over than most preachers’ children: His father Ralph isn’t just a preacher, but a missionary—and in one of the most inhospitable corners of the entire globe: Switzerland. Reformed Presbyterians of the strictest hue, the Beckers consider Lutherans to be only slightly better than Catholics, and they’ve spent more than a decade in the Alpine wastes trying to save them both. It’s not the easiest place to save souls, and Ralph would frankly have preferred to preach to the Hottentots or Zulus, who have been known to convert en masse, but his wife Elsa is the daughter of the mission board director, and this may have been the reason behind their assignment to the tepid but temperate northern climes. As both the baby of the family and the only boy, Calvin is very much under the domination of his mother and two sisters, but he’s starting to chomp at the bit somewhat in an early-adolescent kind of way. Last summer on vacation, he let an English girl kiss him once, and this year he’s taking lessons from Eva, the hotel maid, who brings him breakfast in bed and performs un petit service at the same time. It’s a crisis in the making, of course, but just as Calvin’s corruption is about to be discovered, he’s saved by his father—who at precisely the right moment suffers a nervous breakdown and renounces his faith.This takes the pressure off Calvin, but it creates a dilemma for him as well: How can you rebel against a rebel? Calvin has to find a way of converting his father so that life can get back to normal. Sort of.
An amiably diverting account of domestic chaos, but nothing more.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1259-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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