A welcome (if, alas, posthumous) introduction to a sui generis writer.
The first collection in English from the acclaimed Argentine short story writer (1936-2018) who possessed a well-trained eye for life’s idiosyncrasies.
Uhart’s stories often turn on the simplest of everyday settings: baking a cake at home, a trip to a hair salon, a day at an elementary school, a homeowners’ association meeting. Yet the delivery is just a touch off-center, as if her prose were microdosed: The narrator of “At the Hair Salon” imagines the woman washing her hair “rations out the assault like a cat” and figures the pedicurist “was destined for heroic deeds, like driving a tank in the steppe”; the homeowners’ meeting escalates from complaints about mail delivery to climate change. The offbeat observations are fitting for characters who tend to see the absurdity of existence: “Human beings are radically alone,” says one character; “the world was just one big prison,” thinks another. Sometimes Uhart's stories take a fablelike form, as in “The Wandering Dutchman,” about a foreigner’s bemused travels through the Argentine countryside (“the whole world was a concert of cows, doves, and frogs”), or “Mister Ludo,” about a man who hikes his family from town to town with six children in a line behind him, as if they were ducklings. But the stories are unified by Uhart’s interest in families, especially women’s roles within them. The opening “Guiding the Ivy” follows the narrator, who is going about her day while fearing becoming a woman whose “life was in a perpetual state of disaster”; in “The Light of a New Day,” an elderly woman fears for the neglect of her neighbor, who’s broken her hip. These stories rarely adhere to conventional plots, but as mood pieces they’re effective glimpses into the peculiarities of Uhart's characters, who crave order but usually concede that the world's default mode is disarray.
A welcome (if, alas, posthumous) introduction to a sui generis writer.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939810-34-2
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
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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