A perversely inventive and amusing portrayal of alienation and despair from a highly regarded Romanian author whose work is here translated into English for the first time. It's a chronicle of journeys and encounters, described by first-person narrator Gellu Nauma blocked poet and novelist who ``couldn't care less about literature and words,'' scans the newspapers for reports of bizarre if not paranormal phenomena, and endures meetings and relationships with interestingly deranged people (including several loquacious corpses) who seem to be ingeniously distorted simulacra of people he has loved, tolerated, hated, or fled from. The action, if it is such, ranges from the cramped streets of a surreally reinvented Bucharest to a ``swamp'' to which Naum escapes with his (imaginary) beloved Zenobia, an incarnation of the Woman Spirit that alternately seduces him, sustains him, and scares him half to death. What we're observing, in this uniquely creative comedy of philosophical self-scrutiny, is a flirtation with loneliness, creative sterility, and death, which finds a revivifying counterbalance in the saving disturbances posed by ordinary people and quotidian life (``I needed them, the presence of each and every one, and their words, however stupid, to convince myself that we existed together''). It sounds forbidding, and its curious rhetoric takes some getting used to, but Naum's ingeniously acerbic and paranoid crank (who has a little of Dostoevsky's Underground Man in him) proves himself surprisingly good company. Oddball specificity and intricate generalization coexist smoothly here and give Naum's eloquently cadenced prose both a rich texture and a surprisingly brisk pace. (The translation effectively conveys Naum's penchant for abstractionbut readers may grind their teeth at its occasional misuse of ``like'' for ``as.'') High metaphysical hilarity from a hitherto unknown master whose work in its strongest moments recalls the best of Beckett, Gombrowicz, and Ionesco.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8101-1254-X
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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