An affecting flash-fiction reimagining of the Good Book.
A set of revised Bible stories with an eye toward better highlighting the role of women and presenting a God who's as conflicted as those he made in his image.
The second novel by Rakow (The Memory Room, 2002) opens with a woman visiting a confessional for the first time in more than 30 years and bearing a “Bible of her own” filled with brief, often poetic recastings of the Old and New Testaments. The general narrative arcs remain intact in these retellings—Cain slays Abel, a burning bush appears before Moses, Jesus is tempted in the desert, and so forth. But Rakow thoughtfully offers sensitive and complex readings that are free of moral thundering. For instance, the source of Jesus’ temptation is not Satan but Jesus himself, and Noah’s tale is less about the fate of the Earth than of Noah’s own marriage: “his wife and family senseless on the water, the life they had, obliterated.” Nobody is more self-questioning here than God himself, whose mercurial nature is sparked by his need “to be loved not for his power or his omniscience but for his mercy.” Rakow also emphasizes the women in the Bible, particularly in the New Testament stories, including the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene (here one of Jesus’ close confidantes), the “unclean” woman with an issue of blood, and more; the crucifixion is seen largely from the perspective of a young peasant, Veronica. Rakow doesn’t radicalize the Bible—only a hard-liner would take offense at her interpretations—but she does make it more humanistic and poetic; as the endnotes explain, she’s borrowed some lines from Jack Gilbert and Henri Cole. The effect is occasionally overly airy, but she gets credit for using religious language while avoiding familiar sentiment and interpretations.
An affecting flash-fiction reimagining of the Good Book.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61902-575-2
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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