Unless Gao’s internationally acclaimed plays are a lot better than his fiction, it’s hard to understand why this writer was...
The experiences of a dissident artist-intellectual who finds himself in an adversary relationship with Mao’s Cultural Revolution are once again examined—if not consistently dramatized—by the Chinese Nobel laureate (Soul Mountain, 2000).
Like that later autobiographical novel, this one (originally published in 1997) is a collage whose unnamed narrator describes at sometimes numbing length his provincial childhood and youth, confusion of familial and political allegiances, career as a successful (if increasingly suspect) writer and artist, and relationships with many, many women, whom he seems to captivate, seduce, and satisfy without half trying. The narrative begins wonderfully, with luminously detailed reminiscences of his tenth birthday party: an idyllic, centered watershed moment in a life soon thereafter to be characterized by fractured relationships and ceaseless wandering. The declared intention, “to describe in simple language the terrible contamination of a life by politics,” is both realized and occluded by its odd organization—as a story told by him to Margarethe, the German woman who becomes his lover during a period of self-exile in Hong Kong, which employs second-person direct address to himself while he is thus (and elsewhere) exiled, and omniscient narration to describe his past in China. The story is valuable for its vivid piecemeal picture of 20th-century China’s culture of revisionist egoism, paranoia, and repression, especially in segments that focus on the imperiled activities of a “rebel Red Guard group” of which the narrator is a leader. And there is admirable dramatic intensity in the stories of Qian, a fugitive woman met by chance who impulsively (and unwisely) marries the narrator, and Sun Huirong, a naïve village girl who is raped, disbelieved, and summarily condemned to “re-education.” Otherwise, alas, One Man’s Bible is repetitive, discursive, and declamatory to a degree that leaches away far too much of the drama inherent in its content.
Unless Gao’s internationally acclaimed plays are a lot better than his fiction, it’s hard to understand why this writer was awarded a Nobel Prize.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-621132-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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