Refreshing and spare, like a bittersweet melody echoing in an empty hallway, Matthewson's debut novel will linger in the...
In London, people suddenly, inexplicably begin to lose things both physical (the wall of a house, piano keys) and intangible (their way, their status).
This novel breathes life into the cracks of everyday existence, creating a world in which even metaphorical loss creates a physical absence. Jake, whose mother has recently died, serves most closely as a central character as he begins to collect lost things, displaying an uncanny ability to understand the story of each thing he finds. His relationship with his father, however, begins to literally disappear at the same time, and his father’s girlfriend, Delia, who has lost direction in her own life, must fight to bring them back together. Marketed as a novel, this often reads more like a collection of very short stories. As the fragments of individual stories begin to coalesce, however, instead of feeling forced or overly clever like many ensemble pieces, the connections only deepen the individual—and the novel’s collective—sense of loss. There are moments of magical realism (a girl slowly becomes a tree) and moments of humor (a man one day cannot find his office building, therefore literally “losing his job”). Taken together, they provide a quiet but heartfelt commentary on the unpredictability and isolation of modern life. We may live in an age where everything seems to be at our fingertips all the time, but often these connections come at the expense of actual human relationships. The book “is a reminder that the world is not quite as we expect it to be,” and while that brings with it sadness, it also offers a sense of wonder at the limitless possibilities of existence.
Refreshing and spare, like a bittersweet melody echoing in an empty hallway, Matthewson's debut novel will linger in the reader’s memory.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-756247-3
Page Count: 300
Publisher: The Friday Project
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
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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