Hardy’s lack of novelistic skill hobbles her attempt to pull together the personal and the political, the past and the...
Kashmir is the setting for this messy first novel by a British nonfiction author (Bollywood Boy, 2003, etc.).
It’s October 1999. A coup in Pakistan rattles nerves in Indian Controlled Kashmir. The majority of the population is Muslim, and Muslim guerillas have been fighting the army for ten years. Even the unabashedly secular Gracie Singh feels the ripples as she totters around her houseboat on idyllic Nagin Lake, across from the summer capital of Srinagar. English Gracie, pushing 80, is the widow of an Indian aristocrat; her beloved son Hari died young in a car accident. A feisty eccentric, well-lubricated by gin, Gracie is the default protagonist, cared for by a mute, Suriya Abdullah, and her beautiful daughter, Lila. The Abdullahs are a powerful local clan; their effective head, Masood, is Gracie’s landlord and erstwhile drinking companion. Now Muslims are under pressure to be devout, and Masood has fallen into line, though he’s distraught when his nephew Irfan disappears, fearing (correctly) that he has joined the guerillas. Indian soldiers come looking for Irfan, treating the Abdullahs with contempt; the Major, a disciplined bully, hints at ethnic cleansing. It’s the novel’s most powerful scene; Hardy’s grasp of her material is less sure when it comes to personal relationships. An unconvincing young journalist, Hal Copeman, arrives from England to interview Gracie, though she’s not part of his assignment. He becomes her houseguest and falls in love with Lila, a woman half in shadow. The mystery of her paternity, her mother’s mute condition and their loss of status, from rich Abdullahs to lowly servants, will not be revealed until the epilogue. Hal and Lila will make love twice, and Gracie will have a lovely 80th birthday party before the lurking violence closes in.
Hardy’s lack of novelistic skill hobbles her attempt to pull together the personal and the political, the past and the present.Pub Date: April 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-8021-1822-4
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
