Fiction with a strong moral edge, offering a Rashomon-like response to a classic novel.
The nameless Arab victim of Albert Camus’ The Stranger receives a biography and a name in this thoughtful, controversial rejoinder from the other side of the colonial question.
“Musa, Musa, Musa…I like to repeat that name from time to time so it doesn’t disappear.” So writes Algerian novelist Daoud, whose protagonist returns Camus’ favor by skirting around the name and facts of his most famous book, except to complain that Musa is destined to “remain ‘the Arab’ forever.” Meursault, Camus' murderer, is long dead, and so, of course, is Musa. Unlike Meursault’s mother, though, Musa’s is alive—ancient but alive—and still trying to get recognition as the progenitor of a martyr in the cause of Algerian independence. Alas, the bureaucracy is even more indifferent than Meursault. As for the brother/narrator, he’s a barroom kvetcher and keeper of grudges who, like Meursault, can barely be moved to stir—until one day, some accident of fate compels him to act, finally, and take his lumps for it. The parallels between Meursault and him are numerous, and though the mood of Daoud’s slender novel, originally published in French in 2013, is more plaintive, it is also grudgingly respectful toward its predecessor: “A masterpiece, my friend. A mirror held up to my soul and to what would become of me in this country, between Allah and ennui.” It is for his sly insertions of religious questioning that Daoud has come under fire in his native country, having been the recent subject of a fatwa for venturing to suggest, in the final chapter, that the proper business of humankind is to tend to life on the mortal plane. Free-speech advocates may want to praise the author for his daring view on that matter, but this novel is praiseworthy enough as it stands.
Fiction with a strong moral edge, offering a Rashomon-like response to a classic novel.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59051-751-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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