MY NAME IS SEI SHONAGON

Name: MY NAME IS SEI SHONAGON
Author: Jan Blensdorf
ISBN: 1-58567-443-5

by Jan Blensdorf ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2003

Meditations and mini-essays about the delights and drawbacks of all things Japanese are interwoven throughout, providing...

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Australian journalist Blensdorf, now England-based, debuts with an overwrought melodrama about the beleaguered life and long identity crisis of a woman half-Japanese and half-American.

So much could have been so wonderful if our narrator’s imaginative and likable American father hadn’t died in New York “one evening as a stolen car shot out of the darkness.” His death leaves the little girl and her modest Japanese mother at the mercy of his parents: the grandfather is nice enough, but the grandmother is a crushing snob who scorns the mother and wants only to Americanize the girl a.s.a.p. Result: the two flee back to Tokyo to live with “my mother’s elder brother.” So much could have been so wonderful if only the unmarried uncle weren’t an intolerable, cruel, perverted male-supremacist brute (he’s obsessed by samurai swords) who drives his sister to suicide, whereafter he does something equally unspeakable to our poor girl narrator. And so much could have been so wonderful if only the narrator’s new husband hadn’t turned out to be—well, a brute and slug. Her shameful divorce alienates her enraged uncle forever—but our narrator inherits a little incense shop and, in its quiet upstairs room, sits behind a screen and listens to the sad stories of her male “clients,” then gives such spoken comfort and advice as she can. (The real Sei Shonagon was a courtier in the Heian period who, when she was given paper as a gift, used it to write The Pillow Book, circa a.d.1000). What at last seems true happiness—with the love of French photographer Alain—ends up, thanks again to brute villainy, to be something worse than any of the deaths, suicides, rapes, or divorces so far.

Meditations and mini-essays about the delights and drawbacks of all things Japanese are interwoven throughout, providing much ethnic and historic and cultural information. But, as fiction, Voices is slow going, the melodrama unrelieved (and unbelievable), the message a toss-up between the heavy-handed and the saccharine.

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2003

ISBN: 1-58567-443-5

Page Count: 158

Publisher: Overlook

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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Awards & Accolades

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14

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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Awards & Accolades

Likes

14

Google Rating

New York Times Bestseller

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.