In the darkness, which precedes sight or place or name, man and calf waited." The man is waiting for the calf, the calf is waiting to be born, and the reader waits throughout these short tales and poems of peasant life for the promised sociological insight. Pig Earth is the first of three projected volumes on the transition from the peasant way of life to the metropolis, and Berger (G, A Seventh Man) somehow sees these tales as parables to which he adds a broad but cursory historical afterword. Yet style and story are too lean to support the socio-historical baggage, and so ultimately we are left with stories—most of them with a Marxist tendency to glorify the noble peasant—of cows being butchered and goats mated, of mysteriously-knowing dwarf girls and grandfathers. A man's refusal to accept mechanization of the farm is defended by his insistence that "Working is a way of preserving the knowledge my sons are losing. . . . Without that knowledge, I am nothing"; a country gift is mocked in Paris by other, more sophisticated, servants: "The cook told her to go back to her goat shit. It was the first time Catherine heard the word peasant used as an insult." In a poem titled "Potatoes" even this dowdy peasant staple gains a certain nobility: "During the snow/ heaped in cellars/they gravely offer/ body to the soup." Though Berger disavows any attempt to romanticize ("As soon as one accepts that peasants are a class of survivors. . . any idealization of their way of life becomes impossible"), we find here only the sketchiest view of peasant life. Better look to the historians (Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou; Eric Hobsbawm & George Rude, Captain Swing; Eric Wolf, Peasants) for the sum and substance of peasant life, and its role in major historical developments. Peas and porridge, but no pie.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1980
ISBN: 0679737154
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
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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