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STREET OF THIEVES

Énard writes passionately about Lakhdar’s movement from innocence to experience, and the novel’s various settings all ring...

A coming-of-age story that plays out across a contemporary landscape of the Arab Spring and other social uprisings.

Lakhdar, the narrator, begins his story in Tangier, in his native Morocco. He’s obsessed with girls, especially with his cousin Meryem. When he’s caught in a compromising position with her, his father beats him, and his family essentially disavows him. Lakhdar begins to work as a bookseller with the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thought, becoming closer to his friend Bassam and to the group's leader, Sheikh Nureddin. This job provides little nourishment for Lakhdar’s restless spirit, however, and neither does a move to a job as a typist with a French businessman. Eventually Lakhdar links up with Judit, a Spanish student studying Arabic in Tangier. We learn that restlessness is not simply personal, but also cultural when violence breaks out in Tangier and Marrakesh. For several months Lakhdar works on the Ibn Battuta, a ferryboat plying the waters between Morocco and Algeciras. Ultimately, he makes his way to Barcelona (where he lives on the eponymous Street of Thieves) to seek out Judit, with whom he’d stayed in desultory contact since she left Tangier, though Lakhdar suspects her passion has cooled. They do get back together, and Judit even helps him get a job tutoring students in Arabic, though their relationship is colored by the discovery that Judit has a tumor. When Sheik Nureddin reappears with Bassam on a business trip to Barcelona, Lakhdar notices how serious and committed his old friend has become—and his worry eventually leads to tragedy.

Énard writes passionately about Lakhdar’s movement from innocence to experience, and the novel’s various settings all ring depressingly true.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-940953-01-4

Page Count: 203

Publisher: Open Letter

Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

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THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10

Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.

Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.

Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.

Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.

Pub Date: July 19, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016

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