Un bon livre.
Debut author Reyl’s coming-of-age novel about a young American artist who paints captivating scenes of life in The City of Light.
It’s 1989: A wave of revolution sweeps the Eastern Bloc countries, Salman Rushdie’s inflammatory book, The Satanic Verses, is published, and Kate, a recent Yale graduate, arrives in Paris to work as an assistant for famed photojournalist Lydia Schell. Kate’s an artist who's still seeking her direction, and she's excited about the opportunity she's been offered, even if, per her contract, she has to pay $400 of her $600 monthly salary to live in the tiny garret of the family's home. Kate’s lived in France before as a child and speaks flawless French. When she was younger, she was sent to live with cousins after her father was diagnosed with cancer. He lost his battle two years later, and Kate's feelings of being cheated out of being with her father during his final days and her desire to do something that would make him proud are part of the baggage she carries. She's a naïve young woman who craves approval, and she wants very badly to fit in. But the self-absorbed, pretentious Schell family doesn't exactly welcome Kate as one of their own, and she's treated more like a servant than an assistant: walking the family dog and cleaning up urine; acting as a go-between for Lydia and her husband, Clarence, and for Clarence and a graduate student; acting as a companion to Portia, the daughter, who’s been dumped by a man with whom Kate's secretly having a relationship. But in her naïve way, Kate rationalizes that she's learning a great deal from all these experiences, so she's willing to be the doormat that everyone uses but no one really notices—up to a point. With age and experience, Kate becomes more aware of who she is and what she wants, and ultimately, she grows into her own person.
Un bon livre.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5503-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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