A poignant little story that will give you pause.
A former simultaneous interpreter devotes herself to a year of silence.
Argentine author Cristoff (False Calm: A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia, 2018, etc.) writes of Mara, who takes a job as a guard in a small Argentinian town’s museum following a professional debacle, envisioning a year of silence as atonement, reflection, and resistance: “She sits in her museum guard chair and watches—silent, ecstatic, with no interruptions of any kind.” Mara, whose story is interspersed with excerpted passages from literary and historical sources she’s copied into her notebook, develops a strict code for the year. “One of the key protocols of the experiment she came to this town to carry out is to not ask questions. To speak the absolute minimum, and, above all, to never ask questions. One year, that’s all. One year of practicing the art of keeping quiet.” Mara manages by nodding, grumbling, and letting others fill the space. Her silence is anything but passive. “Muteness is also the art of a still body…remaining silent is important as a paradoxical speech act.” There is “eloquence implicit in this business of remaining silent, and she enjoys it doubly, out of revenge, rage, and vengeance.” Cristoff plays with ideas of speech, pause, and power. Mara was a skilled interpreter, and she becomes skilled in more laconic arts. Eventually, she is recruited from her post to help in the embalming of two valuable horses at the museum. Her own silence, “a discipline of the body,” and the stillness of the beasts stand in contrast to the chatty, idiosyncratic taxidermist. It was an act of sabotage that ended Mara’s career as an interpreter, and it is another act of sabotage that occupies her mind during the project. Silence as reflexive communication is, in many ways, similar to the way Mara sees taxidermy: “Here there is art, here there is science, and here there is great respect for the original.”
A poignant little story that will give you pause.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-945492-30-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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