Awarded the 1999 Prix Carbet de la Caraibe, what could be a downbeat, angrily heroic, and grim capstone to Condé’s career...
The 12th and most autobiographical from Condé (Windward Heights, 1999, etc.) returns to her fictional roots, where generations of Caribbeans discover strength and dignity as they endure inhuman cruelties and emotional betrayals.
Desirada (the Desired) is a harshly beautiful island off Guadeloupe where the impoverished descendants of French political prisoners, lepers, and escaped slaves know that the good life must be anywhere else. In a series of vivid flashbacks, Marie-Noëlle, the light-skinned, unattractive, illegitimate daughter of Reynalda, a native of Desirada who was herself illegitimate, wonders about the boundless love that inspired Ranélise, a barren prostitute in the port town of La Pointe, to pull the pregnant, half-drowned, 15-year-old Reynalda from the sea, help her through a difficult birth, then nurture both her and her infant Marie-Noëlle. Showing no love for Marie-Noëlle, Reynalda leaves her with Ranélise and goes to Paris. Years later, having attained an education, a job as a social worker, and a lover with whom she has had a son, Reynalda demands that Marie-Noëlle join her in Paris. Mother and daughter remain estranged, though the adolescent Marie-Noëlle adores her half-brother Garvey and finds herself drawn to the philandering Ludovic, her mother’s lover. After tuberculosis and two years in a sanatorium, Marie-Noëlle is left alienated and emotionally dead. A hasty marriage to Stanley, a self-absorbed jazz musician, takes her to the slums of Boston, where she resumes her studies after Stanley’s suicide, becoming (like Condé) a professor of French literature. She returns one last time to Desirada to learn the truth about her origins and find out why Reynalda, now a successful French novelist, never gave her the affection she craved.
Awarded the 1999 Prix Carbet de la Caraibe, what could be a downbeat, angrily heroic, and grim capstone to Condé’s career insists that the only way for women to survive so much suffering, and truths too sad to set anyone free, is to “learn to invent a life.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56947-215-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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