Again blurring the lines between past and present, fact and fancy, Tuten (Tintin in the New World, 1993, etc.) reconfigures his familiar theme of love's totemic urgency, here pitting the needs of Vincent van Gogh against those of a late-20th-century rival in Manhattan's East Village. When flame-haired Ursula steps through the only standing wall in one of Alphabet City's rubble-strewn lots, she by chance also steps forward in time and into the startled gaze of a downtrodden photographer, a boozy epileptic who thinks he's having another fit. He isn't, though, so he takes her home, where she strips away her century-old garments, soaks in his tub, and begins to tell her story. She is herself a photographer, morphine-addicted, and the teenage muse of van Gogh. He is completely infatuated with her, though her own desperate needs bring nothing but trouble to their relationship. In fact, Ursula was searching for a fix when she stepped through the wall into the next century, and in spite of her would-be rescuer's (whom she names Louis after the dealer she was really looking for) now being infatuated with her himself, Ursula still craves the calm that narcotics provide. She explores Louis's demimonde, then strikes out on her own, taking in all that the city's drug culture can offer and recasting herself as a punk beauty. In spite of her assimilation and her affection for the hapless Louis, however, she worries about Vincent and one day steps back through the wall to her French cottage—though the mechanism of her return malfunctions, so that Vincent finds her as something less than she was. A tender tale, its magical effects as beautifully nuanced as its portrayal of van Gogh is passionate. The New York scene, though, is far less compelling, leaving a mismatch in intensity that's hard to overlook, no matter how much one might want to.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-15134-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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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