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BODILY HARM

Name: BODILY HARM
Author: Margaret Atwood
ISBN: 0385491077

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 1982

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Rennie is a free-lance Toronto journalist in her thirties. She's recently had a partial mastectomy; she has lost her live-in lover; she has entertained a brief but one-way crush on her doctor. Moreover, her apartment has been broken into. Not unexpectedly, then, all of this proves to be entirely too much for Rennie—so she wheedles a travel-piece assignment from a friendly magazine editor and flies down to the Caribbean island-state of St. Antoine for a spell of rest. It turns out, of course, to be nothing of the sort. The hotel is crummy, Rennie's lonely, the food is awful. And what human contacts she does make are at best ambiguous. A drug-dealer named Paul provides Rennie's first sex since her operation: "she enters her body again and there's a moment of pain, incarnation, this may only be the body's desperation, a flareup, a last clutch at the world before the long slide into final illness and death; but meanwhile she's solid after all, she's still here on the earth, she's grateful, he's touching her, she can still be touched." And a hang-about woman named Lora involves the unwitting Rennie in a gun-smuggling errand. (Lora's lover, Prince, is vying for control of the island's government.) Finally, then: there's a brief futile attempt at a revolution (worthy of operetta); it's crushed; and Lora and Rennie are jailed—and mistreated. True, Atwood's scenario here, banal as it is, supports an incline of conclusions: that sex is at base an aggression of power, if not full-out violence; that no matter how civilized, we are never beyond "bodily harm"—sexual, medical, or political; that knowing we are all equally vulnerable is a sort of rescue, even luck. But Atwood has, in Life Before Man especially, previously embodied the same dark philosophy in a more artful, far less didactic way. And the Final scenes of degradation are so appallingly immediate that they echo back on what then seems like an overly-long and mostly empty narrative corridor leading up to them. Still: strong work, reflecting a powerfully bleak vision—though too obvious and linear for fully satisfying fiction.

Pub Date: March 20, 1982

ISBN: 0385491077

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1982

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

- SEEN & HEARD
Podcast Will Explore Bennington College Lit Trio

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Secret History’ Is New ‘Today’ Book Club Pick

- SEEN & HEARD
Jenna Bush Hager Launching Author Podcast

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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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.