A fascinating tour of the wild side, conducted by a writer who has been surprising us for over forty years.
The other side of life on the French Riviera, as seen with understated compassion and intensity in this previously untranslated 1982 collection of thematically related—and brilliantly written—stories.
French New Wave veteran Le Clézio is best known for such knotty postmodern texts as his prizewinning first novel, The Interrogation (1960)—and insufficiently recognized for his more conventionally realistic fiction, of which these 11 tales are memorable examples. They illuminate a world of the underprivileged and outcast, where teenaged girls combat boredom by joining motorcycle gangs (in the title story), or become victims of their impulses toward adventure (“Ariadne”); or, in the ironically titled “The Great Life,” embark on a spree of petty crime while pursuing dreams of escape from moribund housing projects and soul-numbing jobs (“It was as if they were on the other side of the world . . . [or] lost thousands of miles away, deep in outer space.” Other vagrant protagonists include an escaped prisoner lulled into carelessness by the pristine beauty of a “mountain wilderness” (“The Escape”); a bereft lover who “haunts” the scene of his girlfriend’s death in a car accident (“Anne’s Game”); and a nine-year-old schoolboy (“David”), whose failed attempt to run away from home like his older brother before him suggests that we’re watching the birth of an adult criminal. The disparity between a shimmering landscape’s romantic promise and the grim realities of ordinary lives is powerfully etched in a little girl’s fearful observation of a demolition crew at work (“Yondaland”) and an adult observer’s bitter memories of a wealthy neighbor’s lavish “Villa Aurora” as it was during his youth and as it is under the pressure of urban renewal and inevitable change. And in the chilling little masterpiece “Moloch,” poverty is unsparingly incarnated in the figures of a despairing pregnant woman and a silent, menacing “wolf”-like dog.
A fascinating tour of the wild side, conducted by a writer who has been surprising us for over forty years.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-8032-2946-1
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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