Familial awkwardness and bizarre imagery take this story of unrest and disquiet to memorable places.
The narrator of this taut, surreal novel finds herself stranded in a strange rural landscape.
As Oyamada’s novel begins, a married couple has decided to move to a rural area because narrator Asa’s husband has been transferred there. His new office is near where his parents live, and they offer the couple the newly vacant house they own next door to their own. It’s an appealing offer, and Oyamada uses the couple’s economic anxieties as a way to keep the book grounded. Before the move, Asa and a friend discuss the specifics of the cost of getting a manicure, and she muses on the difference in compensation between permanent and temporary employees at her workplace. After the move, the couple has only one car, leaving Asa stranded when her husband goes to work: “Except for rush hour, the bus came only once every sixty minutes, and it was a forty-minute ride to the train.” One day, her mother-in-law asks Asa to run an errand for her—a simple task, involving a visit to a nearby 7-Eleven. But on the walk there, Asa encounters a bizarre mammal, which she compares to a raccoon, a weasel, and a dog. “Maybe it had hooves,” she adds. She follows it, then falls into a hole, where she meets a woman who refers to her as “the bride.” Throughout, Oyamada balances the surreal with the quotidian. Asa meets her husband’s long-lost brother, who she never knew existed and who's perennially shadowed by a group of bug-obsessed children who call him Sensei. Throughout the novel, Oyamada memorably conveys Asa’s dislocation. The prose frequently transforms everyday scenes into something menacing, too: “Deep in the grass, I caught glimpses of black shapes, moving quietly. It was the heads of children.”
Familial awkwardness and bizarre imagery take this story of unrest and disquiet to memorable places.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2887-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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 touching portrait of courage and friendship.
A lifetime of friendship endures many upheavals.
Ellie and Homa, two young girls growing up in Tehran, meet at school in the early 1950s. Though their families are very different, they become close friends. After the death of Ellie’s father, she and her difficult mother must adapt to their reduced circumstances. Homa’s more warm and loving family lives a more financially constrained life, and her father, a communist, is politically active—to his own detriment and that of his family’s welfare. When Ellie’s mother remarries and she and Ellie relocate to a more exclusive part of the city, the girls become separated. They reunite years later when Homa is admitted to Ellie’s elite high school. Now a political firebrand with aspirations to become a judge and improve the rights of women in her factionalized homeland, Homa works toward scholastic success and begins practicing political activism. Ellie follows a course, plotted originally by her mother, toward marriage. The tortuous path of the girls’ adult friendship over the following decades is played out against regime change, political persecution, and devastating loss. Ellie’s well-intentioned but naïve approach stands in stark contrast to Homa’s commitment to human rights, particularly for women, and her willingness to risk personal safety to secure those rights. As narrated by Ellie, the girls’ story incorporates frequent references to Iranian food, customs, and beliefs common in the years of tumult and reforms accompanying the Iranian Revolution. Themes of jealousy—even in close friendships—and the role of the shir zan, the courageous “lion women” of Iran who effect change, recur through the narrative. The heartaches associated with emigration are explored along with issues of personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good (no matter how remote it may seem).
A touching portrait of courage and friendship.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781668036587
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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