A brave and bold novel about radical self-acceptance and living in the face of trauma.
Chronic pain takes center stage in this funny, moving meditation on coming to terms with your body's limitations.
Norwegian transplant Laura must find her way in New York City as a newly single mother with an unpredictable and vulnerable body. "For years, I've considered it an established fact that the female body is a pain in the ass," she deadpans in the novel's opening line. "The male body seems like a sunny campsite in comparison." In her mid-20s, Laura was diagnosed with endometriosis, a painful condition that left many of her internal organs scarred and fused together despite numerous treatments and corrective surgeries. Now, at 36, she must also navigate a recent divorce, single parenthood, and dating women and men in a body that won't always cooperate. When Kjetil, the loving Norwegian ex Laura abandoned to move to the U.S. and pursue a writing degree, suddenly immigrates to the city, Laura is yet again confronted with the particular pains of her past. Havelin's debut moves backward in time, from the chaos of contemporary New York to the thrill of coming-of-age in a body that still feels full of promise. As a young girl in Norway, Laura struggled with chronic stomach pain and severe allergies that derailed her interest in figure skating, alienated her from her parents and friends, and eventually disrupted her ability to work, love, and feel productive. "It's crystal clear to me that no one wants to hear about it," thinks Laura, "but I will never finish needing to tell how much it hurt, how much it hurts, how bad it is." It's unusual to encounter such open and bold writing about pain as well as the attendant fear, resentment, and stress that burden someone who needs care and treatment. Havelin's novel is unsparing in this regard, showing how deeply Laura struggles with the psychological burdens of having a body with a mind of its own and how hard she works to get free. She's a caustic, wry, and tender heroine who will make you root for her even in her darkest moments.
A brave and bold novel about radical self-acceptance and living in the face of trauma.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948-34005-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dottir Press
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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