The incantatory style is a bit over the top, but, still, Sapphire’s Grave is a lyric paean to black women through the...
A Detroit attorney’s first novel, the tale of an African slave and her many descendants.
Sierra Leone, 1749: Nameless and feared by all on board, a lissome slave with blue-black skin and cicatriced face is brought to the captain for his sexual pleasure—and nearly tears his throat out. Later, in Charleston, her daughter, named Sapphire, grows to womanhood knowing only that her mother died in a fire. She too becomes a slave, proud to a fault though under a cruel owner whose severe punishments are intended to set an example for others on his plantation. Sapphire is the mother of three when she and a newborn meet death at this master’s hands, but her three daughters live on. In the 1870s, their descendant, Sister, begins to channel the spirit of Sapphire, reliving her life as she falls into one fit after another. Sarah, an old midwife and healer understands that Sister is possessed and not crazy, but the patient is past healing. Her good-for-nothing husband, Prince, keeps another woman on the side, Queen Marie, an independent sort who hopes that Prince will leave Sister once and for all but doesn’t want his child or any other traditional traps. Prince is careful, but his young son, Prince Junior, isn’t—and the boy ere long loses his virginity to his father’s paramour, leaving Queen Marie unexpectedly pregnant, though by father or son she doesn’t know. She gives birth to Vyda Rose, who becomes a successful prostitute with her own brothel. More of Sapphire’s descendants appear and disappear on a crowded stage—until the birth of Clovey in 1932. Much loved and unusually intelligent, Clovey has rare insight into the lives of her ancestresses. Her precocious art of seeing is often inspired by her great-grandma Sister, whose otherworldly mien both fascinates and frightens Clovey. When Sister finally dies, Clovey re-creates these generations of unsung women in paintings that receive acclaim for their visionary power.
The incantatory style is a bit over the top, but, still, Sapphire’s Grave is a lyric paean to black women through the centuries.Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50323-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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