Purdy (The Candle of Your Eyes, 1987, etc. etc.) comes home with his first American publication in more than a decade, a stupendous elegy on the silences of love. In suburban Chicago in an indeterminate past—probably the ’40s—Victor and Carrie Kinsella move through the bric- a-brac of their North Shore lives without much evidence of purpose or pleasure. Prosperous enough in an old-money sort of way, they grumble at each other as old couples are wont to do and spend most of their time talking at cross-purposes or trading accusations. Their daughter Gertrude—now some years dead—was an artist whose bohemian rebelliousness kept them both well at bay during her short life and now makes her absence all the more difficult to bear, especially for Carrie. “Behind all this tame, insipid life we were leading on Stony Island Avenue, there was something after all mysterious, strange, and yes frightening.” And Carrie means to find out what it is. To begin with, she discovers that her husband—“Daddy,” as she calls him—is secretly compiling a massive and nonsensical record of his childhood and youth, entitled “Index of Forgotten Items.” So she leaves Daddy, moves in with a friend, and persuades Daddy’s lawyer Cy Mellerick—once Gertrude’s lover—to show her her daughter’s secret world. “Around me I saw a terrible Chicago I had previously barely glanced at,” which in actual fact was a Chicago of passions: of jazz and painting and liquor and sex. “A city of fearful energy and confusion, ceaseless change and sunless sky.” And in a climax that she had anticipated least of all, Carrie sees Gertrude’s art . . . and faints. Afterward, she understands her daughter, and herself, for the first time: —I was like some strange winged creature coming out of its cocoon.” A rare triumph: as elegant in its simplicity of tone as it is moving in its purity of feeling, Purdy’s work deserves to place its author in the first rank of contemporary writers.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15901-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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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