The themes of redemption and reconciliation are not quite as electrifying as the author’s scary portrait of an America...
Hospital (North of Nowhere, South of Loss, 2004, etc.) turns the mythical tables, sending a modern-day Eurydice to hellish secret interrogation facilities in search of her Orpheus, a musician suspected of terrorist ties.
Leela, a graduate student at MIT, falls in love with Mishka, the grandson of Hungarian Holocaust survivors who grew up in remote rural Australia. He’s in Boston studying music, but he has an odd habit of disappearing after each of the terrorist bombings that now regularly disrupt the city. (The unspecified time seems to be the very near future.) After an explosion on the Red Line, Leela is kidnapped and taken to an “interview room,” where her chief interrogator is Cobb, a boy she grew up with in Promised Land, S.C. The tortured son of an abusive, alcoholic Vietnam vet, Cobb was as much of a misfit as Leela, the openly promiscuous daughter of a preacher. But he despised her liberal views and was insanely jealous of her lovers. In a truly creepy interrogation scene, Cobb tells Leela that Mishka’s real name is Mikael Abukir and he’s been seen visiting a Boston mosque with the man who blew himself up on the Red Line; Cobb also shows her photos that make it clear he’s been following her every move. The stage seems set for a horrific tale of vengeance and destruction, especially as readers learn with Mishka that the father he never knew (a Lebanese student in Sydney who supposedly died after he got Mishka’s mother pregnant) is now a notorious Muslim fundamentalist. Has gentle Mishka been lured into terrorism as a means of connecting with his father? To what gruesome ends will Cobb’s rage take him? The answers turn out to be more optimistic than the grim opening chapters indicate.
The themes of redemption and reconciliation are not quite as electrifying as the author’s scary portrait of an America deformed by fear and anger, but a novel that grapples so thoughtfully with such resonant issues demands close attention.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06552-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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