A dreamlike meditation on isolation and the bone-aching desire for companionship.
In award-winning Icelandic novelist Eiríksdóttir’s English-language debut, an older woman fixates on a young playwriting prodigy, and both women come to the realization that they are linked by shared trauma in their pasts.
Elín Jónsdóttir is a woman in her late 60s living alone in Reykjavík. She makes her living creating props—severed limbs and decaying corpses, especially—for the theater and Nordic crime films. Elín crosses paths with Ellen Álfsdóttir, the 19-year-old daughter of famed playwright Alfur Finnsson and author of a new play that’s garnering a lot of buzz. This atmospheric, disorienting tale is narrated by Elín, who says “the reason I decided to write this is that if I don’t, no one will,” and that it's “an attempt to connect signs that were conveyed in waking life and in dreams.” Elín, who had a difficult childhood, has spent her adulthood pushing others away. She claims that she “[can] see feigð, someone’s death approaching.” Long ago, she “accidentally got mixed up in the most salacious story of them all”: one involving Ellen’s philandering father, who was discovered dead halfway between his wife’s house and that of his mistress—Ellen's mother. Elín’s work in the theater brings her close to Ellen, and she spies on the young woman and her artist mother. “The people I wanted to get to know were far beyond my reach,” Elín confesses, and the unexpected delivery of boxes full of memorabilia from her dead grandmother’s house forces her to recall that she has obsessed over others before with traumatic and tragic results. As Ellen’s play is produced and Elín circles closer to the girl, she finally acknowledges the spell she’s under and that “trauma is, of course, nothing but an enchantment.”
A dreamlike meditation on isolation and the bone-aching desire for companionship.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4403-5
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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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