A man’s life relayed through vignettes that stand alone better than together.
In this novel, an Indian man comes of age amid changing times.
Sunny comes from a small “evergreen village” named Manjoor, where his simple life follows the rhythms of the monsoon. Soon, however, the region’s rural delights give way to suburban sprawl, signaling the start of Sunny’s lifelong struggle against spoiled paradises, some physical, some emotional. Despite his village’s growing pains—as well as his own—Sunny finds much to appreciate about life. He has many friends, siblings who love one another, and parents that care for him, even if his father is, at times, a harsh disciplinarian. The family doesn’t have much, but they endure. Eventually, Sunny leaves home to pursue a career in social work in Ahmedabad. Though Sunny finds fulfillment from his profession, the work takes an emotional toll. He’s saddened by cultural traditions that reinforce the stigma of mental illness, particularly the way families must suffer shame when a suicide occurs. Not even marriage and children of his own can fully dispel Sunny’s persistent gloom. Eventually, he and his young family strike out on their own, hoping to find a better life. George clearly knows Indian life and social work well. The novel is full of evocative details that help bring the story to life, but unlike a traditional bildungsroman that builds chapter by chapter in a strong storyline, the connections between chapters here are episodic in nature and fail to create a symphonic whole. Readers will find themselves immersed in a particular development from Sunny’s life—say, his mother’s brush with death—only to have that thread disappear entirely from future chapters. For all George’s focus on his protagonist’s emotional life and innermost thoughts, as a character, Sunny never quite transcends the page, often feeling distant and a bit wooden.
A man’s life relayed through vignettes that stand alone better than together.Pub Date: June 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1450289986
Page Count: 284
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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