Sparkling, facetious, and entertaining.
In these 22 stories, South African writer Vladislavic employs tones ranging from surreal absurdity to meditative wit as he delves into themes of isolation, racism, and politics.
This volume collects two separate story collections published earlier in South Africa: Missing Persons (1989) and Propaganda by Monuments (1996). The 11 stories of the first book are suffused with humor, both absurd and surreal. In “Journal of a Wall,” the narrator chronicles the building of a wall over a six-month period, finding himself alternately fascinated, obsessed, or even tormented as he spies on the bricklayer creating this barrier. And as in all “wall” narratives, one of the themes readers are asked to contemplate is what’s being walled out—and what’s being walled in? Kafka would feel at home in a number of the stories here. In “The Box,” for example, the narrator reaches through the screen of a television set and grabs the diminutive figure of a prime minister, who is kept in a cage, fed, and watered in a spare room. The title of “When My Hands Burst into Flames” says it all—this phenomenon is presented as both fantastical and routine, though by the end of the story the narrator begins to relish the destructive power that has been unleashed: “Later I think I will torch the park across the street. Meanwhile, I am content to play with fire.” The stories in Propaganda by Monuments are more realistic but equally witty. One of the best is the title story, which is laugh-out-loud funny. Pavel Grekov, a Russian translator, has gotten a letter from Boniface Khumalo, a South African who has “pedestals galore” and wishes to acquire a statue of Lenin. Known for his “command of a fractious and somewhat eccentric English vocabulary,” Grekov reassures Khumalo that he’s “overwhelmingly cocksure that your request re: SURPLUS STATUE will meet with a big okey-dokey fairly forthwith.”
Sparkling, facetious, and entertaining.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939810-11-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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