Though Livings works as a journalist, his fiction shows a whole lot more than moonlighting potential.
A debut collection of stories by an American author about post-Mao China provides fresh perspective through its understated, straightforward prose.
These stories are sneaky, almost subliminal, in their ambitions and connections. Almost all the protagonists and other characters are Chinese or at least indigenous to the region, with the lone exception of Claire, an American student in “The Pocketbook,” who “savored the taste of the unsettled air between the two arenas of existence.” For the reader and perhaps the author, these stories also seem to exist between two arenas, not typically American nor authentically Chinese, but in a realm of possibility that invites similar savoring. Claire discovers that the streets outside her cloistered college aren’t as safe as she might have thought, as a 10-year-old expert robs her (and then himself falls victim to social Darwinism as he loses his spoils to older and tougher thugs), while Claire becomes caught in a protest that she barely understands. Because the author writes so simply, and so well, the human complexities of these stories and the connections among them reveal themselves subtly rather than with great drama. None of the stories are explicitly political, though “The Crystal Sarcophagus,” the longest tale, illuminates what it means to live within a value system likely very different from the reader’s. With the death of Chairman Mao, the commission for his crystal coffin represents a great honor but also an impossible challenge, as it is decreed that a project that should take more than three years must be completed in 10 months. “When completion of a task requires conditions that do not exist, create proper conditions!” orders the official from “[t]he Party [that] outranked physical laws, scientific fact, logic.” Within all of these stories, the human element provides the common denominator.
Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-17853-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
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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