A debut exploring how we open up to others—and, more importantly, ourselves.
A young woman traveling abroad gets far more than she bargained for.
Imbued with sex and politics, Locascio’s debut novel casts the traditional bildungsroman into a darker, more feminine light. In the wake of her parents’ divorce, 18-year-old Roxana can't wait for her pre-college study-abroad trip to Paris. Shortly before her departure, the travel agency informs her that while she can no longer go to Paris, she has been offered a spot in their Copenhagen program. With an eye on adventure and a need to escape, Roxana accepts the offer. Shortly after arriving, she falls into a passionate relationship with Søren, her older, mysterious tour guide. When Søren invites her to spend the summer in rural Denmark, she says yes. In the empty, white apartment, Roxana begins to explore the pleasures of her body with and without Søren. While Søren becomes more unpleasant and less recognizable, Roxana’s desires—for companionship, touch, and adulthood—threaten to consume them both. As Søren pulls away, Roxana is drawn to a Bosnian refugee named Zlatan, whom locals call Geden, meaning “the Goat.” From their politics to their treatment of Roxana, the two men could not be more different. As she’s pushed to the shadowy periphery of Søren’s life, the novel—like Roxana—begins to turn inward. There are fewer flashbacks and longer, claustrophobic stretches detailing Roxana’s body, her longings, and the space she inhabits. The novel’s sometimes-deliberate sparseness gives way to sensual and frank descriptions of genitalia, bodily functions, and domesticity: “The way formless hours could fall wide as splayed knees” and “the space between my legs became the center of everything, opened like a peeled grapefruit.” Above all else, Locascio centers the female body exquisitely.
A debut exploring how we open up to others—and, more importantly, ourselves.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2807-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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