There are undoubtedly serious intentions here, and certainly some metafictional fun, but the style is too often dreary, the...
This gathering offers some of the Australian author’s familiar themes and writing that is eccentric, thought-provoking, and maddening.
Despite the “Short Fiction” in the title, one of the pieces runs 106 pages, and two are also included in a 2005 collection of the author’s essays. Then again, Murnane (The Plains, 2017, etc.) often blurs fact and fiction. Among the collection’s almost conventional stories, “When the Mice Failed to Arrive” has hints of pedophilia and sadism as a teacher reckons with an aborted school project. “The Only Adam” describes a howling and mating ritual among eighth-graders. The title story/essay contains many of the essential Murnanesque elements. The image of two adjacent bodies of water in Melbourne sends the narrator riffing on mustaches, places, and family in an exercise similar to the “chain of thoughts” approach in Border Districts. Such rumination, along with autobiographical details, a love of books, an obsessive geographical precision, and a seeming deafness to word echoes, will characterize most of the remaining fiction: “As a child I could never be contented in a place unless I knew the names of the places surrounding that place.” The Tao of Murnane is sometimes amusing, as in “The Interior of Gaaldine,” in which a writer attending a literary event in Tasmania is asked for his thoughts on a 2,000-page manuscript that contains “a detailed chronicle of horse-racing” in an imaginary island nation. It can also be tiresome, with a style that sounds like a government report written by a bureaucrat with mild Asperger’s. The forced flatness is starkly evident when Murnane now and then slips in something like: “the saturnine men sipping their murky plum liqueurs while sunset reddened the Carpathian peaks above them.”
There are undoubtedly serious intentions here, and certainly some metafictional fun, but the style is too often dreary, the point elusive, the effect irksome and disappointing.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-12600-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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