An extremely important contribution to the field of Mormon fiction, whose current growth just might make all that...
In this novelistic collection of short stories, a gay Mormon missionary struggles to make sense of sexuality and spirituality in 1970s Italy.
Like most young Mormon men, Robert Anderson wants to show his devotion to his church and his God by being a good missionary. The challenges of adjusting as a 19-year-old to missionaries' stringently austere lifestyle and a foreign culture are exacerbated by the shameful, burdensome secret of Anderson's homosexuality. Nonetheless, Anderson believes that if he's righteous and obedient enough, God will bless him by making him straight. Surviving earthquakes and a war between factions of organized crime are frankly easier than coping with the despair of finding that no matter how faithfully and diligently he works, he's still gay. And the biggest problem Anderson faces is his fellow missionaries, not just those he’s attracted to, but a mean-spirited roommate who uses his authority to torment those he dislikes—especially Anderson. But eventually Anderson is assigned as a working companion a beautiful, young Italian who loves Anderson for the kindness and compassion he shows others; that acceptance helps Anderson see that he deserves some of that compassion himself. It's a pleasure to watch Anderson stand up to his bullying roommate and to joke about situations that he previously could scarcely have acknowledged aloud. Ultimately he calmly accepts disgrace because it carries with it such valuable understanding of himself and the nature of the church for which he's been working. Like all short-story collections from Townsend (Let the Faggots Burn: The UpStairs Lounge Fire, 2011, etc), this new work explores the demands and rewards of being Mormon, occasionally in excessive detail; aware of how unfamiliar Mormonism can seem to a general audience, Townsend occasionally overexplains Mormon doctrine and practice, commenting here multiple times, for instance, on the fabric most often used in Mormon underwear. Told from a believably conversational first-person perspective, this collection's novelistic focus on Anderson's journey to thoughtful self-acceptance allows for greater character development than often seen in short stories, which make this well-paced work rich and satisfying, and one of Townsend’s strongest.
An extremely important contribution to the field of Mormon fiction, whose current growth just might make all that explication unnecessary in the future.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1609101183
Page Count: 409
Publisher: Booklocker
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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