A robust novel—preposterous, disturbing and dazzlingly written.
A novel of sexual obsession and a little bit of guilt (but not much), from the London-based author of Kalooki Nights (2007), long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.
Felix Quinn is obsessed with becoming a cuckold, and he knows just the guy who can make his fantasy come true. At a funeral for a respected professor, Quinn sees Marius, who once had an affair with Elspeth, the professor’s wife, and whose hyperactive libido led him to seduce two young women that very afternoon. Quinn’s fascination with Marius leads him to construct situations to bring his wife, Marisa, in contact with Marius, and to encourage the two of them to get it on. Quinn sees this sharing as the ultimate act of love and self-sacrifice because “no man truly loves a woman…who does not know her to be lying in the arms of someone else.” Quinn eventually rearranges his schedule so that he’s absent from his house three times a week between 4 and 7 p.m. in order to allow Marius to fulfill his desires with Marisa, though in due course he winds up staying in the house every so often during their trysts. Quinn stays true to Marisa in his own fashion, at one point indulging in some kinky S&M that leaves him hating his partner because she’s not Marisa. Quinn gets sexual satisfaction from his wife’s verbal elaboration on her time with her lover, and Quinn’s questions give rise to eagerly lapped-up prurient revelations. Toward the end Marisa suddenly drops out of both Quinn’s and Marius’s lives as she deals with a malignant tumor. Finally, the possibility is raised that Marisa may have made up her experience with Marius simply to satisfy her husband’s craving.
A robust novel—preposterous, disturbing and dazzlingly written.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9423-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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
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