A contrived world? A contrived book, though, if such a thing is wanted, an inducement to torpor and despair.
Does Korean literature have a slacker-novel genre? If so, here’s its archetype.
The protagonist of novelist/translator Jung’s (Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories, 2013, etc.) slender yarn is a man of thought. Much thought. Too much thought. When he travels from Korea to find his girlfriend living with a Mexican man in Los Angeles, he finds himself pondering the interloper’s tattoo, then his rightness for a part in “a dull western movie in which a great many people are shot to death,” then his “very large black penis.” Never mind the discordant ethnicity, for our narrator is now off to thinking about lying in bed with his erstwhile girlfriend, “holding her nipple in my mouth without sucking on it or thinking about sucking on it.” Evidently exhausted by his mental efforts, he takes his time doing much of anything: a week drinking tequila here, a few days of gazing down at a vacant lot from the top of a scrubby hill there. Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man is already looking like Jackie Chan compared to this fellow by the time an odd habit of his begins to become painfully evident, namely a bizarre hyperattention to every scrap of data that passes by his eye or through his thoughts, so that Jung (for this is a conscious choice on the writer’s part, after all) spends hundreds of words having him wonder whether the catfish he’s ordered in Chinatown—at least he’s managed to move a few hundred miles north to San Francisco—was raised in Vietnam or the “Mississippi River Valley,” wherever that might be. By the time he gets to pondering the local fauna, the reader may be inclined to move a few hundred miles away, too: “Somewhere else in this world there might be a park with more moles, but I could not imagine a park with more moles than Golden Gate Park, which made the park seem to belong to the moles.”
A contrived world? A contrived book, though, if such a thing is wanted, an inducement to torpor and despair.Pub Date: April 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56478-955-6
Page Count: 163
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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