Wideman's latest novel picks up where the title story in last year's Fever left off—it's a dense and rage-filled meditation on the bombing of a houseful of blacks in West Philadelphia in 1985. The first half of this intense, poetic narrative concerns one man's personal struggle to find a rumored survivor of the conflagration—a boy named Simba Muntu, whose fate somehow seems linked to his own. For the past ten years, Cudjoe has enjoyed self-exile on a Greek island, trying to forget his string of failures as father, husband, friend, and Afro-American. Having sat out the political struggles of the 70's, he's become obsessed with the fire in Philly, and the image of a screaming, naked boy running from the flames. Cudjoe's research includes interviews with a former member of the so-called MOVE cult; a mouthpiece for the mayor, who was one of the handful of blacks at Penn with Cudjoe; and with a bunch of hoopsters courtside in West Philly. Midway through the novel, however, the fictive perscoa breaks down, transforming Cudjoe into a sort of Everyblackman, including the author himself. Wideman's discursive narrative reflects on his effort to stop time with this ostensible fiction, pausing long enough to consider the tragedy of his adolescent son's incarceration for tour. der. There's also the nagging suspicion that, in this mix of fact and fiction, he's just writing "clever, irresponsible, fanciful accounts of what never happened, never will." Which brings him to J.B., the city's source for information on the MOVE household. Now a "funky derelict" in Center City, this crazy, Rasta-fied street-person indulges a paranoid vision of genocide while hustling for quarters until some white kids set him on fire. Plagued by doubt and guilt, Cudjoe never Finds the boy—but at a vigil for the victims he does pledge, "Never again." Ultimately, this is a tale of survival in which the author himself finds redemption in his art. With its dark and cynical humor, this metafiction will disturb as many readers as it dazzles.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990
ISBN: 061850964X
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
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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