An unsentimental, heartwarming page-turner. Quite an achievement.
Lansens (Rush Home Road, 2002) overcomes the inherent “ick” factor in this surprisingly moving story of conjoined twins in a small Canadian community.
Ruby and Rose Darlen are joined side by side at the head. Rose, who tells most of the story, was born with a normal body but with her face pulled out of shape. Ruby’s face is lovely, but because her legs never fully formed, Rose must carry her. The twins have separate brains, separate personalities and interests. They even have separate jobs at the local library. As the novel opens, they are approaching their 30th birthday. Rose, who loves literature but passed up college because Ruby would not attend, has decided to write her own autobiography, offering to let Ruby compose her own chapters. Rose tells the dramatic story of their birth on the day a tornado touched down, of their mother who immediately abandoned them and of the saintly but colorful local nurse Lovey and her dashing but kindly husband Stash who adopted them. Although Rose often describes Ruby as a stereotypical “shallow pretty sister” (except most such sisters are not conjoined with misshapen bodies or heads), we gradually learn that Ruby is more than a pretty face and has in fact gathered a museum-quality collection of Indian artifacts. Rose leaves it to Ruby to mention the crucial fact that the sisters are dying from a brain tumor. Rose also has difficulty discussing the baby she conceived with a local boy who kissed Ruby’s lips while impregnating Rose’s body. Having given the baby up for adoption, Rose now yearns to find her. That bit of melodrama aside, the novel’s power lies in the wonderful narrative voices of Rose and Ruby. Lansens has created a richly nuanced, totally believable sibling relationship between two small-town girls in a community filled with lively haracters.
An unsentimental, heartwarming page-turner. Quite an achievement.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-06903-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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