Come for the promise of a big reveal; stay for the beauty of small moments.
A trio of women create, discover, and keep disappearing on each other in this melancholy modern fable.
Despite what the usual comparative literature syllabus tells you, magical realism isn’t limited to the South American masters. In her bizarrely lovely new novel, NDiaye (Three Strong Women, 2012, etc.)—also a playwright, essayist, and screenwriter—offers strong evidence that the particularly French version of elegant, often opaque mystery does as well in fiction as on film. Here’s what we know for sure: Clarisse Rivière, nee Malinka, visits her mother, Ladivine, once a month in Bordeaux. Then Clarisse has a daughter, also Ladivine, whose namesake is barely aware she exists. When Clarisse dies unexpectedly, both mother and child learn about her killer from the press. Here’s what we don’t know: most everything else, even after the final page. Yet NDiaye manages, by dropping tiny hints writ exquisite, to keep those pages turning all the same. Through flashbacks and passing glances—for instance, the lone phrase in which we learn that Ladivine mère is black—she builds a complex story of three desperately sad, searching lives. These scenes don’t tend to end well for the players, but NDiaye’s gift with language (rendered delicately by her translator, Stump) gives them surprising appeal. Clarisse calls her mother “the servant,” accepts her role as “the princess,” and celebrates her daughter as “that marvelous baby.” But as she withdraws further into herself, losing her husband and gaining a dangerous lover in the process, it becomes more and more difficult to get a sense of who this double-named woman really is. The reader’s desire to find out mirrors the longings of the two Ladivines. NDiaye reveals only as much reality as she wants to at any given moment, though—and therein lies her magic.
Come for the promise of a big reveal; stay for the beauty of small moments.Pub Date: April 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35188-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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