Somewhat limp and intermittently exceedingly arch. But a case can be made for listing the book among the most amusing...
There’s something to offend everybody and entertain many in this engagingly subversive novel from the resolutely quirky author (Ambivalent Zen, 1996, etc.).
In a bizarre near-future narrative accompanied by dozens of faux-scholarly footnotes, critically acclaimed author Walker Linchak (best known for his series “The Completes” —e.g., The Complete Book of 9/11) describes the experience that makes him a cultural icon. Awakening one morning, he discovers that a substantial crust has materialized inside his right nostril. Thus is a new search for information and meaning initiated, as Walker—like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, adjusting to insecthood—undertakes to analyze the phenomenology of Nasalism: i.e., nose-picking. Both Walker’s accomplished wife Sara and his brother Mickey (a condescending psychoanalyst) assume he’s nuts. Yet the world of cyberspace opens its virtual arms to Walker’s musings about a habit that’s lauded as principled self-exploration and ridiculed as masturbatory. Our author’s “nasal blogs” stimulate widespread interest and enviable fame. Sara’s hesitant adoption of the practice becomes surprisingly sexually arousing. And Walker’s former Yale roommate, unemployed President George W. Bush, becomes an enthusiastic acolyte, appearing on Larry King Live and emotionally endorsing a “bad habit” now being recognized as a candid admission of the human need to relax, do what feels good and not feel bad about it. It’s difficult to imagine a satisfactory resolution for this defiantly eccentric fiction’s dippy premise, and Shainberg settles for a flatly unconvincing open ending. Still, the poker-faced parodies of scientific methodology and Internet self-importance are fun (it’s about time somebody lampooned Wikipedia), and it’s oddly ingratiating to hear soon-to-be-ex-President Bush enumerating his own failings rather than leaving the job to amateurs of all persuasions.
Somewhat limp and intermittently exceedingly arch. But a case can be made for listing the book among the most amusing fiction picks for fall.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9763895-8-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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