Not all of this collection matches that high level, but there's more than enough here to enhance Tanizaki's...
Six previously untranslated, wickedly warped stories, all but one originally published before 1927, from the acclaimed Japanese master of bizarre and erotic fiction (Quicksand, 1994, etc.).
Tanizaki, who died in 1965, gives the phrase “child's play” a new twist in “The Children” (1911), which shows a young schoolboy becoming a willing participant in the sadomasochistic sport of his wealthy, spoiled classmate. After school they concoct new torments for each other on the grounds of the rich kid’s estate, drawing his older sister and the son of the family groom into the fun. But the forbidden pleasure of the piano studio, which only the sister may enter, proves an irresistible lure, ultimately giving her the upper hand to devise her own forms of depredation. In a somewhat later story, “Mr. Bluemound,” a beautiful movie actress whose young husband and director has succumbed to a mysterious illness makes a startling discovery while reading his will. There she finds the story of her husband's life-altering encounter with a middle-aged man so obsessed with her that he's purchased pieces of her films so as to exactly reproduce her body parts, which then become part of a collection of life-sized rubber dolls he uses around his house. Perhaps the most memorable erotic innovation here, however, involves something done with food. The title story describes the search of an aristocratic gourmand throughout Tokyo for yet-unimagined delectables, a search that brings him by chance to a private Chinese club where he is permitted to observe (through a hole in the wall) but not to taste; from there he brings back to his own gourmet group, among other things, an experience with bok choi and a woman's hand that is truly a classic moment in world literature.
Not all of this collection matches that high level, but there's more than enough here to enhance Tanizaki's still-substantial reputation.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2001
ISBN: 4-7700-2690-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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