Veteran writer Goran revisits the milieu he introduced in Tales from the Irish Club (1996) with more nostalgic, if not always notable, tales of the club's habituÇs. As in his previous collection, it's Goran's evocation of a time—the 1940s and early '50s; a place—the projects of Pittsburgh; and a people—the working-class Irish who lived there— that give the stories a special edge. The city still belonged at that time to people who had good jobs in the mills, lived in the neighborhoods where they grew up, and socialized upstairs in such places as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Local #9. A close, warm world, but also one with its downside: Family scandals are soon public knowledge, and grudges are often settled in public. In the title story, a man marries a woman with a birthmark; to his bewilderment, instead of being grateful she divorces him six years later. Disconsolate, he haunts the club. Stories that particularly catch the flavor of the milieu include ``Our Billy,'' in which two families feud over an accidental death; their enmity is resolved when his ghost is seen at the club. In ``The Big Snow,'' a college- bound member marooned in the club with two old alcoholics realizes that his attitude to their dancing has spoiled ``a good time for people who don't have that many of them.'' In ``The Moment,'' a lonely boy's delight at being accepted as a member when he courts one of the local women is destroyed when he betrays her. Other pieces relate a son's being comforted by the bartender's recollections of his saintly father (``Evening with Right Racklin'') and a young man's inability to return to the club after talking too freely about making love to his wife-to-be (``Spellbinder''). Literate tales that chart the waywardness of the human heart- -but in strokes too broad and sentimental to be truly affecting.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1997
ISBN: 0-87338-576-4
Page Count: 306
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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