Inventive if not always complete.
The veteran Canadian novelist and poet follows up her American debut (Tracing Iris, 2003) with stories that show narrative aptitude, a degree of experimentation, and a proclivity for the poetic turn.
The centerpiece is the title novella, really more like a collection within the collection, following a pair of sisters through five pieces, some of which appeared individually in literary journals. In “Versions,” family stories about younger sister Claire being held dangerously out a window by older sister Marcia achieve the mythic in their various retellings; in “The Savage God” (vide A. Alvarez), both girls are in Sylvia Plath mode, and they eventually head for a lake with a boy who might not return; “Family Reunion” recounts a dinner when the sisters are much older, when all that old self-destructive behavior provides material for members of the family to humiliate each other; “Inside Editions” follows Claire as she visits Marcia in early middle age, on the occasion of Marcia’s first extramarital affair; and eventually the family (“Thicker Than Water”) gathers once again for a final vacation on the occasion of the parents’ 45th anniversary. Gunn demonstrates versatility throughout the rest of the collection, though some of her smaller short-shorts might be more accurately described as false starts than actual prose poems. “Los Desperados” is perhaps the finest of the bunch, about a couple on the rocks who return to the place of their original happiness, a honeymoon in Mexico, only to find that the place is as changed as they are, and to happen upon a swinging Mexican general with designs to pry them apart for good. Another winner is “Fugue,” about a dead relationship that finds its best metaphor in its seemingly musical repetition of a cat torturing a mole on a balcony.
Inventive if not always complete.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-55192-566-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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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