In other words, it’s vintage Oe: provocative, doubtful without being cynical, elegant without being precious.
Pensive novel, at once autobiographical and philosophical, by Nobel Prize–winner Oe (The Changeling, 2010, etc.).
It’s a scenario that conjures up the director of Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, perhaps the only person who could film it: Oe, now 80 years old, returns to his hometown in the person of alter ego Kogito Choko and looks deep into a past that might have been. In real life, Oe’s father died in World War II; here, Choko’s father has died during the war years in a drowning incident on a Japanese river, and now Choko, having endured decades of writer’s block on the matter, is circling back to his youth to excavate the contents of a mysterious red leather trunk, “a small part of my clan’s proprietary strange and funny lore,” in the hope of reclaiming his literary birthright. What’s in the trunk? And why did his father die? Was it really an accident? Mystery abounds, especially when it develops that Choko père was working to help alleviate wartime famine by detoxifying lilies. That’s a matter of some complexity, and Oe lingers over the details without any apparent rush to get back to the main story; indeed, he takes a leisurely pace throughout, having set aside the fraught intensity of Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness and other early works. Complicating Choko’s quest in the nearly idyllic countryside of his youth is the presence of an avant-garde theatrical collective, whose members are trying to stage Choko’s ouevre and now puzzle over the story as it develops: “the part of the story where the writer sifts through the contents of the red leather trunk as the entire drowning novel unfolds before us is just a vague concept.” Indeed, and part of the reader’s task is to accommodate Oe’s vagueness and misdirection to arrive at a crafty ending, embracing twists and turns and plot points that are, among other things, “radical and potentially scandalous.” Like, say, a “pubic-hair fetish.”
In other words, it’s vintage Oe: provocative, doubtful without being cynical, elegant without being precious.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2401-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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