FERNHURST, Q.E.D. AND OTHER EARLY WRITINGS

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FERNHURST, Q.E.D. AND OTHER EARLY WRITINGS

Name: FERNHURST, Q.E.D. AND OTHER EARLY WRITINGS
Author: Gertrude Stein
ISBN: 0871401614

by Gertrude Stein ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1971

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For one whose life and reputation depended so heavily on magnificent friendships, Gertrude Stein has remained an oddly remote figure — formidable to her contemporaries and largely dismissed by later generations. This volume of early writings does much to bridge the distance she herself, by style and sheer adamance of outlook, helped to enforce, and invites a kind of sympathy she would never again permit. All three (with the titles cited, there is a first draft of the opening chapters of The Making of Americans) were composed circa 1903, when she was-beginning her hesitant drift from Johns Hopkins toward the rue de Fleurus — but most importantly, when she was caught up in a powerfully disorienting and agonized lesbian triangle. In psychological terms, her problem was one of validation — how to interpret behavior which had no conventional context — and these relentlessly anatomizing, "geometrizing" stories were a means toward, not catharsis, but clear understanding. A grueling business it must have been, especially in "Q. E. D.," which literally recreates the affair in all its emotional nuances from letters and remembered conversations. But all are parallels to some extent; all reflect her moral and psychological preoccupations, her curiosity, and her pain. After reading them one is better able to appreciate her reflexive endorsement of the bourgeois, her insistence on "things as they are" (however incomprehensible that vision might be to others), and, most especially, her own dignity and depth of feeling. Leon Katz's Introduction supplies the background with befitting tact, and a marginally related essay by Donald Gallup traces The Making of Americans from manuscript into print. Of special bibliographic interest too, since none of these has been printed before in its original form.

Pub Date: July 1, 1971

ISBN: 0871401614

Page Count: 260

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1971

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS ILLUSTRATED
by Gertrude Stein ; illustrated by Maira Kalman

- BOOK REVIEW
PARIS FRANCE
by Gertrude Stein

- BOOK REVIEW
TO DO
by Gertrude Stein

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Awards & Accolades

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17

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

17

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
BOOK OF LIVES
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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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.