Most of the 19 stories here have been published in small magazines, and a number anthologized. This isn't surprising: Eidus's tales (Vito Loves Geraldine, 1990, etc.) often seem either written to order or just not weighty enough for more mainstream venues. The author's jokier tales poke fun at familiar targets: the therapeutic culture; health clubs; and the shallowness of Hollywood. Eidus also mocks our obsession with celebrity in a series of pieces about pop icons: In ``Elvis, Axl, and Me,'' a former mental patient discovers Elvis alive and well, living in the Bronx as an Hasidic Jew; in ``Barbie Goes to Group Therapy,'' a group of whiny women seek revenge on the doll they blame for their unhappiness; and in ``Jimmy Dean: My Kind of Guy,'' the narrator sleeps with the dreamy actor who's still alive and writing a play at an artists' colony. False hope, the loss of innocence, and nostalgia for a lost childhood all figure into other stories such as ``The Mermaid of Orchard Beach,'' in which a Bronx girl discovers her ability to create her own reality and to fashion happiness from ``what was really so very little.'' Similarly, a woman who believed in the power of goodness as a child can't understand why her mean and nasty sister (and not she) has achieved wealth and happiness as an adult (``The Princess of Lake Forest''). The least successful stories take themselves far too seriously and are written with a sledgehammer sensibility: a portrait of a phone- sex worker and her childhood history of sexual abuse (``Pandora's Box''); ``Ladies with Long Hair,'' about a group of women who refuse to cut their hair in solidarity with those dying from AIDS; and a disposable bit of advocacy on condom use (``Aunt Lulu, the Condom Lady''). A few self-reflexive pieces about writers add nothing to an altogether artless second collection.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87286-322-0
Page Count: 216
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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