A welcome, overdue collection by a writer well deserving of his place in the Latin American canon.
Centrifugal stories, many set in an imaginary city, by the Uruguayan master storyteller.
Ranked alongside Borges and García Márquez, though far less well known, Onetti (1909-1994) exercised much influence over the development of magical realism. In this collection of his short works, the first in English, Onetti himself seems influenced by Poe by way of Baudelaire—but then filtered through William Burroughs, or perhaps B. Traven. The inhabitants of his imagined Santa María, a port city much like his native Montevideo, are a strange bunch, many of them German and Italian immigrants who are nowhere at home. One, Baldi, has money in his pocket from a legal settlement and visions of an Academy of Bliss, “a project that would prove magnificent, with a bold glass edifice rising out of a garden city, full of bars, metal colonnades, orchestras playing next to golden beaches, and thousands of pink billboards.” Alas, the streets are grittier than all that, and, seemingly trying to impress a woman with cash and blarney, he spins a tale that involves racist murder and illegal drugs, “spitting his words out like curses.” Many of Onetti’s characters harbor dreams large and small, most of them abandoned along the way, “ground down under the mindless, constant pressure of so many thousands of unavoidable feet.“ Some, unable to stand up to that pressure, end their lives, as with one 50-year-old woman who finds herself “a slave of the blackness she agreed to sink breathing in for the last time.” Others are blithe in their ignorance or lose their grip, “shamelessly exhibiting an ancient and concealed madness.” Onetti’s stories are enigmatic and elegant, seldom extending more than a few pages; some seem to be only sketches for longer pieces, such as a one-pager in which a stranger plants a kiss on the forehead of a dead man, ”leaving between the horizontality of the three wrinkles a small crimson smudge." All are strange—and mesmerizing.
A welcome, overdue collection by a writer well deserving of his place in the Latin American canon.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-939810-46-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
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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