A very strange tale that could have been unbearably pretentious—but it’s deft and light enough to work, creating just the...
A haunting, elegiac account of a woman’s mysterious death, told by this Norwegian second-novelist (Before You Sleep, 1999) through the voices of the detective and survivors trying to make sense of the case.
There is Twin Peaks–like weirdness to this story, which is much too elliptical to qualify as a typical whodunit. We begin with the death of Stella, an Oslo nurse who falls from the roof of her seven-storey apartment building. Her husband Martin was not only on the roof, too, but seen holding onto her just before she fell—or was he pushing her? The witnesses can’t quite make up their minds. Corinne, the detective investigating the case, is a former ventriloquist whose stomach turns (literally) whenever she is in the presence of a killer. She has a bad feeling about Martin, but there’s not enough evidence to charge him with anything. Corinne also happens to know that in 1934 a lovelorn actor killed himself by jumping off the very same roof. Axel, an old man whom Stella had nursed in the hospital and who subsequently became her friend, had a bad feeling about Martin, too. Martin is a furniture salesman who sold Stella a green sofa and refused to leave after he delivered it—he and Stella had been married for ten years when she died. It seems that Martin had a kind of private game in which he took it upon himself to sleep with every woman who ever bought a green sofa from him. Stella had some quirks, too: She let a plumber move in with her when she couldn’t afford to pay him (he even stayed after she and Martin were married). So, were she and Martin up to something weird on the roof, or was the death just an accident? Or a murder? Suicide?
A very strange tale that could have been unbearably pretentious—but it’s deft and light enough to work, creating just the right atmosphere of foreboding and regret.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41499-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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