A poetic, unsentimental drama that offers a meditation on love in all its disparate forms.
A young woman living in the slums of Barcelona quietly observes the aftermath of a famous writer's interventions.
This is Swedish author Wolff's debut novel (after a book of short stories: Many People Die Like You, 2009), but she uses many of the techniques of short fiction in weaving together a quixotic portrait of a Spanish neighborhood. Bookish types should be warned that the story has nothing to do with literary agitator Ellis, the title character here being one of several dogs named after well-known writers. Wolff applies a gritty patina to her somewhat chaotic novel, opening with a quote from the barfly Charles Bukowski and weaving together an unvarnished play about love and transformation that recalls the work of the late Roberto Bolaño (2666, 2008, etc.) The novel's point of view is mostly that of Araceli Villalobos, a young girl living in a rotted-out apartment whom we follow into adulthood. But the book’s touchstone is Alba Cambó, a famous writer of violent short stories. Through these two characters, Wolff depicts the breadth of the human condition. In one passage, Alba hires a Mexican maid who recounts the story of her son’s death on the border. In another, a newly arrived priest quickly meets an untimely end. In a particularly memorable sequence, a desperate Araceli turns to prostitution, only to find that her first client has been hired by Alba. “You may not be very good at selling yourself, Araceli, but you’re even worse at lying,” the john tells her. “That kind of thing grows on you; the attraction has to take its time. You see the person. You start fantasizing about them. Then suddenly one day you’ve got there, and it’s all wonderful.” The novel’s jarring scene changes can be off-putting, and Wolff’s nesting-doll approach to storytelling may lose some readers as well. That said, the author demonstrates a marvelous command of language and creates characters with real depth, lending the book a sensual vibe and an acerbic wit that force its emotional truths to rise above the grunge of its hard-boiled setting.
A poetic, unsentimental drama that offers a meditation on love in all its disparate forms.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-908276-64-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: & Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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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