An imaginative love letter to a literary hero is given vitality, depth, and charm through the playful intelligence of its...
In a fantastical feminist adventure, three generations of women—including Virginia Woolf, back from the grave—travel the world in pursuit of new opportunities.
“Suddenly there’s time again; & I’m in it,” declares Woolf, the internationally acclaimed literary modernist who committed suicide in 1941, now resurrected in 21st-century New York City due to a thunderstorm and the mental focus of another author and critic, Angela Lamb, who travels from London to the U.S. and then Istanbul to deliver a paper at a Woolf conference. Distinguished British author Gee (My Animal Life, 2011, etc.) doesn’t worry too much about the questions arising from her icon’s peculiar comeback; she just breezes forward, rather like the revivified Virginia herself, who becomes increasingly eager to embrace her second chance at life. First published in Britain in 2014, the novel is presented in overlapping conversations as Angela and Virginia explore their sudden relationship, which is variously tetchy, competitive, caring, and celebratory. Angela’s marriage to explorer Edward is failing, and she has parked her beloved teenage daughter, Gerda, at a boarding school in England for safekeeping during her own absence. But Gerda is being bullied at the school and decides to embark on a trip, too, to find her mother and possibly restore her parents’ relationship. Virginia and Angela, meanwhile, enjoy New York, buying clothes, drinking at the Algonquin, and visiting the Statue of Liberty, while bickering over writing, privilege, time passing, and the problems of the book business. Moving on to Istanbul, the novel’s conversations and speculations intensify, as do its longueurs and intermittent feel of a travelogue. But the delivery of Angela’s conference paper, a rousing paean to Woolf, writing, and seizing the day, heralds a moving conclusion.
An imaginative love letter to a literary hero is given vitality, depth, and charm through the playful intelligence of its seasoned author.Pub Date: March 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-909572-10-2
Page Count: 471
Publisher: Fentum Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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
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