Not the easiest reading, but should find its fans among intrepid English-speakers undaunted by works in translation.
Dense, acrobatic stream-of-consciousness exploring the political and personal ramifications of the violation of a confidence, by Spanish novelist Marias (The Man of Feeling, 2003, etc.).
Exiled to London to work for the BBC, feeling bereft by the loss of the home in Madrid where ex-wife Luisa is raising their two kids, pensive, lonely narrator Juan Deza makes the acquaintance of several shadowy and intriguing characters. Through the elderly Oxford professor Sir Peter Wheeler, a retired Hispanist, Deza meets another suave Oxonian of indeterminate profession, Bertram Tupra, who lures him into more lucrative work as an interpreter to Latin American military types fomenting a mysterious coup d’état in Venezuela. Deza’s job is to observe, to interpret interrogations and to offer an opinion when asked. What he interprets, ultimately, are “stories, people, lives,” and he eventually will begin to make pronouncements on those lives. Meanwhile, Wheeler discloses in long-winded conversation with Deza many troubling facts about his illustrious past. (Among other things, he was a spy in Spain during the Civil War.) Wheeler has collected many drawings and posters from WWII illustrating various situations in which “Careless Talk Costs Lives.” He shows them to Deza—as a cautionary warning? Then he launches into an extended digression on his wartime espionage, noting that “men carry their probabilities in their veins, and it’s only a matter of time, temptation and circumstance before these, at last, lead those probabilities to their realisation.” Deza is being followed by a woman with a dog; the story ends elliptically with a knock at the door. The thread of Tupra’s machinations will no doubt be resumed in Volume II. Marias is a gorgeous stylist, his prose thrillingly meandering in his native tongue and pleasantly rendered here.
Not the easiest reading, but should find its fans among intrepid English-speakers undaunted by works in translation.Pub Date: June 24, 2005
ISBN: 0-8112-1612-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
IN THE NEWS
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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