Bosco’s novel is a work of tremendous lyricism, but his meditations can also grow ponderous.
A young man travels to a remote island to claim his inheritance.
Martial Mégremut can trace his heritage to two families: the gentle, even placid Mégremuts, whose name he bears, and the mysteriously wild Malicroix. When he hears that his great uncle, Cornélius de Malicroix, whom he has never met, has not only died, but also left him a small inheritance, he is intrigued: This Malicroix lived for more than a decade on a small island in the Rhône, with little human contact. Martial goes to the island, where he finds Balandran, a rough shepherd who served Malicroix, and Dromiols, an oddly hostile notary who has settled Malicroix’s accounts. Dromiols informs Martial that in order to keep the inheritance, he must stay on the island, without leaving, for three months. His ensuing stay makes up the bulk of this novel by Bosco, a writer long revered in his native France and who died in 1976. Bosco was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in literature; this is widely regarded as his magnum opus. It is a slow and quiet novel given to long descriptions of wind and rain and the Rhône. Bosco never uses one word when, as the saying goes, he could use 20. Martial hasn’t brought so much as a book to occupy himself. He sinks into his solitary thought. “Everything around me was silent,” he says. “Nothing suggests unlimited space like silence. I entered that space. Sounds color an expanse and endow it with a kind of sonorous body.” And so on. After a while, Martial’s dreams become indistinguishable from his waking life. There seem to be other figures on the island: Are they really there, or are they ghosts? Bosco doesn’t provide many hints. Readers partial to philosophical tangents will find much to enjoy here. Others may find themselves stranded.
Bosco’s novel is a work of tremendous lyricism, but his meditations can also grow ponderous.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68137-410-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
