A tragic love story that ignores context and needs a more critical eye.
A lonely writer falls for a barely teenage girl, and together they embark on a disquieting road trip to wed in Mexico.
Jack Strabler is a lonely author living in the backwoods of Bristol, Tenn., whose solitary childhood and lack of close relationships have turned him into a reclusive figure motivated by his compulsions. The greatest of these is to write and battle his romantic loneliness, even entertaining the unsolicited email advances of a Russian girl named Natalya. But both writing and his Russian correspondence are swiftly forgotten when he encounters 13-year-old Audrey Miland—a precocious girl with eyes full of a perverse maturity and a past of hidden abuse. Overtaken by her coquettishness, Jack begins a vague, abstinence-based courtship with her. When they are found out and forbidden from contacting one another, Audrey finds a shrewd, horrifying solution. Renaming Audrey “Natalya,” the fugitive lovers flee to Mexico to get married, his Talya’s sole caveat for consummating their relationship. Kersh’s (Hotel Sarajevo, 2000) sophomore novel presents a modern-day version of Nabokov’s Lolita that often acknowledges but never escapes its own derivativeness, adding few contemporary flourishes to the narrative beyond superficial cultural references (Hollister, Lady Gaga). Underdeveloped as both a protagonist and narrator, Jack makes few attempts to evoke sympathy for himself, and it’s difficult to form a clear picture of him as a character since his personality shifts constantly. At times, he seems a pathetic figure, broken and obsessed only with matters outside himself, while in other situations he appears indifferent to everything save Audrey, a compelling contradiction that goes unexplored. The novel misses several similar opportunities, perhaps none richer than the ever-fluctuating roles Audrey and Jack take on in their relationship. Along with being disturbing lovers and clumsy friends, both take on complex parental roles with each other, a dichotomy disappointingly buried beneath their crossing obvious taboos. The novel downplays much of the vulgarity, attempting to accentuate the beauty, even the “magic,” of Audrey’s budding sexuality, but somehow it achieves the opposite, basking in a kind of titillation that is as confusing as it is disconcerting.
A tragic love story that ignores context and needs a more critical eye.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479207084
Page Count: 290
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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