A strong collection of first-rate work without a false note. Essential for students of the form.
Latest installment of the storied short fiction prize volume, a going concern for a century.
There was a time, not so long ago, when short story writers were concentrating, tediously, on the lives of short story writers and their on-campus foibles. Horizons have expanded, and perhaps because it’s such a horrible time, the writers in Furman’s latest collection often tend to the horrible and its repercussions. In Viet Dinh’s memorable, ironically titled “Lucky Dragon,” Japanese sailors who ventured too close to the American H-bomb tests off Bikini Atoll return home to transmogrify; now monsters because of radiation poisoning, they are also the victims of superstition: “Already some of the villagers think that if they eat our flesh, they will live forever,” says one bitterly, while another so terrifies his wife that “She handled his bowls and utensils as if they were made from lightning.” In Jo Ann Beard’s “The Tomb of Wrestling,” a young girl, squeamish about animals anyway, spends time on her grandparents’ farm, where butchering animals, “food in its sentient state,” is the norm; as an adult, attacked in her own kitchen, she is forced to respond violently to the violence being visited on her. It’s a scary and all too real tale of terror. In Pakistan, the protagonist of Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Nights in Logar” happens upon a scene of carnage when a shepherd, distracted by a passing American helicopter, takes his eyes from his flock for a moment. A dog attacks so viciously that “he thought his poor little lamb had exploded from the inside out.” In a land of unending war, people wind up the same way. And as for Tristan Hughes’ “Up Here,” whose first paragraph ends, “We were going to shoot the dog. Or rather, I was going to shoot the dog,” you just know things aren’t going to turn out well.
A strong collection of first-rate work without a false note. Essential for students of the form.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-43658-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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