Readers may find it hard to make head or tail of this novella—which, believe it or not, may be the secret of its perverse...
A brief novel about an ambitious man that’s different from the usual fare.
Harnisch (Freaks, 2016, etc.) introduces readers to John Marshall (born Juan Marcinal), a young man who’s seduced in the prologue by a prostitute, Chantal. She gives him a picture of Che Guevara, who is, in her view, the archetypal seducer, and encourages John to follow in Che’s footsteps. John, who survived a miserable childhood, means to escape his station in life by seducing well-connected women and winding up at the top of the heap. He’s introduced to Clyde and Maribelle Roman as a tutor to their children and to a woman named Lauren; later, John seduces Maribelle. Also in John’s life are two priest, Father Padric and Father Peter, who help him in his rise. The author seems to be asking readers to see John as a religious figure, but this status is never really made clear. From the Romans, John moves on to the Sinclair family. Mr. Sinclair is a hotel magnate, and John becomes his secretary, aiming to turn himself into a gentleman. John seduces (and impregnates) the Sinclair daughter, Claudia, and then shoots Maribelle before other, unexpected story developments occur. There’s enough plot to fill twice the number of pages in this slim book, but there are also many questions: what’s the significance of the Che Guevara business? What is John’s (or Juan’s) background? Readers aren’t told, and they’re left adrift in so many parts of the narrative that it’s very hard to characterize the story as a whole. It seems to be set in the present day (for example, there are laptop computers), but, on the other hand, there are archaic notes (carriages, a highly structured society) which evoke, perhaps, the 18th century. The end of the book is so Dickensian, in fact, that readers may suspect that it’s a sendup of that style and will wonder if Harnisch has just been teasing them. If readers enjoy that sort of thing, then they will like this.
Readers may find it hard to make head or tail of this novella—which, believe it or not, may be the secret of its perverse charm.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5238-7838-3
Page Count: 106
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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