A fascinating, provocative, sometimes frustrating read; the stylistic tics may grow tiresome but Murnane’s intriguing ideas...
An old man ruminates on landscapes and houses, authors and religion, colored glass and memory in this drifting quasi-fiction.
The unnamed narrator, age 72, has recently moved from a city to live alone in a “quiet township” near an unspecified border in an unnamed country. In the opening pages, he recalls his school days and the religious brothers who taught him. The colored glass in a church window sparks memories of a book that describes men during the Commonwealth period in the 17th century smashing the stained-glass windows of churches in England. A partial picture of the narrator emerges with references to teaching, marriage, children, relatives, and childhood horse-racing interests. But there’s little ongoing narrative, just vignettes scattered among musings on visual perception and recollections of houses, books, and colored glass. The preoccupations with how one has seen the world and with memory suit an older man and a writer; the prose, with its precision, repetition, and verbal footnotes, smacks of an academic lecturer. Despite the subtitle, the narrator insists he is “not writing a work of fiction” but recording a “sequence of images,” or “a chain of thoughts.” The chain in one 12-page stretch includes a Proust allusion, a book jacket’s author photo, childhood marbles, a kaleidoscope bought in Virginia, the colored glass in kaleidoscopes, 120 colored pencils, and marbles on a carpet which the narrator moves in the hope that a chance arrangement “would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood.” In search of lost marbles? No, the narrator is utterly rational. The sui generis Australian writer Murnane (The Plains, 2017, etc.) is at least eccentric. He seems to be showing how a writer’s mind works when he is writing and when he is riffling through or riffing on vision, insight, and memories.
A fascinating, provocative, sometimes frustrating read; the stylistic tics may grow tiresome but Murnane’s intriguing ideas and oblique angles rarely do.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-11575-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
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
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