Stylistically demanding, sometimes overly so, but unforgettable. This woman can write.
Hospital (Due Preparations for the Plague, 2003, etc.), an Australian now living in South Carolina, uses both continents as settings in this progression of 14 dreamy yet tightly constructed stories about chance, attachment, and disappearance.
Spaced apart, four stories about Philippa and Brian create a spine for the book. The two, who grew up together in tropical northern Australia, share an enduring yet diaphanous friendship that spans divergent careers, thousands of miles, and long stretches of silence. In the opening story, “The Ocean of Brisbane,” Philippa witnesses Brian on a visit home as he escapes spending time with his devoted mother. In following stories, Philippa tracks the elusive Brian, who communicates often in her dreams but seldom in person. He disappears into his work, into mental illness, and finally into death in “Night Train.” By then the facts of their lives have been revealed, but more important are these characters’ recurring sensations of misplacement, loss, and fleeting connection—sensations that inform every incident in the volume. The title piece follows a young woman unable to embrace a promising present because she’s so injured by her past. In the nightmarish “For Mr Voss or Occupant,” a woman’s identity, with fatal results, becomes confused with that of the former tenant of her new house. In “Flight,” a woman who runs away from her life in Australia out of misplaced guilt over a chance occurrence that ended tragically begins a new life by trusting chance. In “South of Loss,” the only previously unpublished story here, the failed attempt of two lonely outsiders to help a battered woman’s child brings them a limited state of grace. In “Nativity,” a white professor from Boston watches his estranged, unmarried black daughter give birth in Atlanta. Optimism begins to lighten the earlier gloom. At last, in “The End-of-the-Line End-of-the-World Disco,” a woman disappears out of joy instead of fear.
Stylistically demanding, sometimes overly so, but unforgettable. This woman can write.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05991-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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