A mordant update of the Emperor’s New Clothes that’s often deeper than it thinks it is.
A loser embarks on the hoax of a lifetime.
Even though British newspaper columnist O’Farrell (Global Village Idiot, not reviewed) is also an experienced TV comedy writer back in the UK, this outing is more than a thinly veiled assault on the industry that has fed him (the m.o. for most TV-scribes-turned-novelists). Jimmy Conway is your basic sub–Nick Hornby waster, an ESL teacher in his 30s who lives in a sludgy seaside town and has a life not quite up to the standards set by the letters he used to write to his older self as a young teenager (based on the assumption that he’d be rich/famous by the time he read them). A sad stab at improving himself through jogging leads to a chance one-word encounter with TV personality (and jogger) Billy Scrivens, an incident Jimmy then plays up to his friends as proof of a supposed friendship. When Billy Scrivens suddenly drops dead, Jimmy, who happens to be walking/jogging by, is interviewed as one of Billy’s mates, a misunderstanding that gets turned into an invitation to Billy’s funeral. At the service, Jimmy tells someone he’s a comedian, a lie that grows legs when a reporter decides he wants to do a story on him. Pretty soon Jimmy, who doesn’t believe he’s done much else with his life up to this point besides walk the dog (“Youth is like the mornings: if you don’t make a good start before lunch, you’re in danger of wasting the whole day”), is fabricating an entire double life for himself as an edgy anti-spotlight comic who’s infamous for some routine involving a fish. O’Farrell keeps Jimmy juggling his two lives far longer than you’d think possible, and even though it all comes to a frustratingly snappy ending (O’Farrell is a TV writer, after all), there are enough brilliant comic monologues to keep the pages flipping right by.
A mordant update of the Emperor’s New Clothes that’s often deeper than it thinks it is.Pub Date: May 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-4134-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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