The first North America-set novel by Allende (The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991, etc.) begins with a beguiling freshness that rapidly degenerates into boring leftist commentary-cum-melodrama— in a plot that goes on and on until it mercifully fizzles out in platitudes. Long-troubled Gregory Reeves, who's never been able to regain the security of his early childhood (cutely recalled now in the form of a confession to a novelist), is the son of Charles Reeves, the ``Doctor of Sciences,'' who travels around the country in a brightly decorated truck—along with wife Nora, a Jewish refugee; helper Olga, a Russian; daughter Julia and son Gregory—revealing the secret of life: The Infinite Plan he's discovered. This idyll ends when Charles becomes ill, and the family moves into the L.A. barrio home of Pedro Morales, a Chicano follower of ``The Plan.'' When the father recovers, they move to a run-down cottage—but for the rest of Gregory's life, the Morales family, especially daughter Carmen, will be an anchor for Gregory. Reality soon begins ``irreparably to deteriorate,'' and though a friendly librarian leaves him money to go to Berkeley, ambitious and hard-working Gregory is unhappy. He graduates from law school; serves in Vietnam; moves to San Francisco; makes two disastrous marriages; fathers two troubled children; and earns and loses a great deal of money. Meanwhile, the decades whirl by as ``revolution in the streets [is] replaced by the plague of conformism'' and characters in equally extravagant subplots finally enjoy their own happy endings. Only Gregory has to wait for the novelist to save him, assuring Gregory ``that everyone carries a plan inside, but it's a faded map that's hard to read and that's why we wander round so and sometimes get lost.'' Potentially original characters, denied their own voices as the writer does the telling, are ultimately overwhelmed by sentimental and overwrought gush. (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: May 1, 1993
ISBN: 0060924985
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1993
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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