Nonetheless, Lee’s first adult outing is an authentic, emotionally powerful portrayal of two cultures.
Young-adult author Lee follows a Korean American woman, adopted as a baby by an American family, to her homeland to learn the language and find her birth mother.
Korean by ethnicity but American to the core culturally, Sarah Thorson is almost 20 when she announces that for her graduation trip she wants to go to Korea. Her worried, blue-eyed parents of Eden’s Prairie, Minnesota, tell her: “You don’t have to do this to yourself.” As part of the Motherland Program at Chosun University in Seoul, Sarah joins other Korean American students who are trying to mold an identity—except that Sarah, whose name sounds like “child for purchase” in Korean, doesn’t know a word of the language, can’t even communicate to buy something to eat. While she is making new friends—like Jun-Ho, a Korean soldier at the Balzac Café, whose malapropisms charm her; and the Korean-American Doug, in her program, who becomes her protective boyfriend—there emerges a mirror narrative concerning the life of a woman who might or might not be Sarah’s birth mother. Kyung-Sook has been selling shrimp at the market in Enduring Pine Village for 20 years, married to a man who didn’t sire the daughter she gave up for adoption in 1972. Lee’s story is an unflinching examination of identity, as Sarah continually asks who she is: the Fabulous Sarah of her high-school years? Or a Korean “Twinkie,” yellow on the outside, white on the inside? The other students are derisive, asking whether the majority of Koreans in the States can trace “their way back to some Korean whore who hooked up with a GI”? The dual narratives are effective, though the plotting tends to get heavily scripted, as Sarah, for example, appears on a TV show about missing persons, and ends up playing the same kind of flute, the taegum, that Kyung-Sook once played.
Nonetheless, Lee’s first adult outing is an authentic, emotionally powerful portrayal of two cultures.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-8388-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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