An elegant and thoughtful meditation on history, family, and personality, nicely packed into a tautly mysterious domestic...
A second from Toronto-based Sakamoto (The Electrical Field, 1999), the story of a young woman’s posthumous discovery of her father’s double life.
Miyo’s father Masao was a Canadian of Japanese ancestry, and Masao was born in Vancouver but sent to Japan for his education—just in time to be stranded there during WWII. As far as Miyo knew, her father had never served in the Japanese military, and he moved back to Toronto as soon after the war as he could and raised Miyo by himself after her mother died in childbirth. Miyo grew up happy but solitary, doted on obsessively by her father, who made a point of keeping her well away from the local Japanese community. But now, in the aftermath of Masao’s death, Miyo is faced with a number of astonishing revelations. First, she discovers that her father’s longtime friend Setsuko was, in fact, his wife, whom he married secretly after Miyo’s mother had died. Setsuko then proceeds to tell Miyo that she has a half-sister, Hana, who is an artist in Japan. Miyo and Setsuku travel to Tokyo to visit Hana, and there Miyo learns that her father had been a kamikaze pilot during the war. All this is disturbing enough, but it implies a number of even more disturbing questions. If he was a kamikaze, why was Masao never sent on a mission? Did he feel like a traitor for surviving? Or had he been the traitor in going to Japan in the first place? As a Asian living in an overwhelmingly Western society, Miyo knows from experience what mischief can be wrought from divided loyalties and confused identities—and now she sees instinctively that the contradictions in her father’s life will mirror those in her own.
An elegant and thoughtful meditation on history, family, and personality, nicely packed into a tautly mysterious domestic drama.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101037-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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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