A fierce novel that explores the topography of passion and grace.
A lyrical novel that takes place over three generations and that reminds us of the arduousness, and even desolation, of love relationships—between husband and wife, spouse and lover, mother and daughter.
The fury at the center of the narrative is embodied in Eleanor Bernstein, whose relationships with her husband Aaron, her daughter Rosa and her countless lovers—both friends and strangers—are equal sources of elation and agony. Espinosa (Incognito: Journey of a Secret Jew, 2002, etc.) knows how to chronicle amatory ambivalence. Eleanor’s relationship to Aaron, a sculptor with an artistic temperament and numerous casual lovers, is emotionally tempestuous though sexually unexciting. Because Eleanor had grown up an imaginative child in a world of privilege, she doesn’t accommodate herself easily to the demands of adulthood and motherhood. For a while, the primary relationship in Eleanor’s life is with Heinrich, a family friend who devolves into a lover. Aaron and Eleanor raise Rosa in a hothouse of pretense and intensity, so much so that Rosa has a breakdown in early adulthood and is diagnosed as schizophrenic. After a tenuous recovery, and against the wishes of both her mother and her psychiatrist, Rosa moves to Paris and takes up with the flamboyant and charismatic Antonio. They get married two weeks before the birth of their daughter, and Eleanor voyages to Paris to witness the birth of her grandchild. But when Rosa is in the hospital awaiting delivery, Antonio first rapes his mother-in-law and then begins an affair with her. Antonio expresses his insight into Eleanor’s character by stating the obvious: that her primary mode of communication is through sex. After the turbulence and frenzy of her many sexual encounters, Eleanor ages, her body succumbing to arthritis and eventually cancer. During this time she grows more reflective and is able to reconcile some of the demands of her body with the realities of physical deterioration.
A fierce novel that explores the topography of passion and grace.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-916727-45-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Wings Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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