Readers hooked by the premise may ultimately find the plotting a disappointment, but Ntshanga’s promising debut is both...
A trio of friends sell antiretrovirals to HIV patients in Cape Town, but their lives are upended when a stranger who knows more about them than he should tries to buy their whole stash.
It’s early in the 21st century, the South African government has not yet made antiretrovirals widely available, and Lindanathi, who contracted HIV while working as a lab assistant, now spends his days hanging out, huffing glue, and, with the help of two friends, Cecelia and Ruan, selling his own ARVs to customers he finds at support-group meetings. One day, the friends receive an email from a man offering to buy all their pills for double their usual price. But the proposition comes with an implicit threat: the man also includes information about where each of them lives and works, and before they even agree to his terms, the stranger has deposited the funds in their bank account. It’s an electrifying premise, though Ntshanga is more interested in Lindanathi’s emotional journey than with the particulars of the plot. Indeed, a good portion of the proceedings concerns not the present but the past. Ten years before, Lindanathi’s younger brother, Luthando, was killed, and Lindanathi blames himself for what happened. As the narrative moves forward, questions build: how exactly did Lindanathi contract HIV? What really happened to Luthando? And who is the stranger at the story’s core? Unfortunately the questions Ntshanga raises are more compelling than his answers, but even if the plot doesn’t completely come together, he still succeeds at exploring major themes—illness, family, and, most effectively, class—while keeping readers in suspense.
Readers hooked by the premise may ultimately find the plotting a disappointment, but Ntshanga’s promising debut is both moving and satisfyingly complex.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-937512-43-9
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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