A misty-eyed paean to traditional romantic bliss.
A man searches for true love, as told through a year of journal entries.
DeRiso blends prose and poetry in his fictional account of an anonymous, lovelorn man looking for his one and only. The narrator begins to keep a journal after the heartbreaking loss of a lover, and the entries detail his progress through despair, hope, and renewal in the year that follows. This debut book mixes the formal conventions of poetry—deliberate line breaks, stanzas, rich imagery—with the confessional style and prosaic content of a traditional journal. The result is a dreamy novel with only hints of a plot, concerned much more with the narrator’s inner experiences than with the details of his life. The volume’s first third is an ode to the lost lover known only as My Baby, in which the narrator delves into the emotional intricacies of that relationship without ever quite telling the reader how and why it ended. Memories include making hot chocolate and doing jigsaw puzzles on Saturday nights and staying at an inn during a winter weekend (“We dined in a quaint little restaurant”). As the seasons pass, the story shifts toward his imaginings of an “unfound love” and efforts to make those dreams into reality (“I have been looking / Everywhere / Every day”). Throughout, DeRiso emphasizes the primacy of romantic love, frequently reiterating the narrator’s urgent concern: “Without the love of wife and children how memorable will life be?” In the unapologetically schmaltzy tradition of Nicholas Sparks, this book hews completely to the fairy-tale ideal of love; even the font is a florid cursive. Accordingly, readers’ enjoyment of the tale will depend largely on whether they swoon or scoff at lines such as, “Come, my love / Take my hand and step with me into our future.” But the narrator’s tribulations, though far from original, are relatable and affecting; anyone who has ever felt lonely or unlovable may find solace in his journey toward peace. At times, DeRiso writes reverently of the natural world and the harmony of life beyond romance, which lends the narrative a bit of spiritual depth. The book is ultimately more sugar than substance, but just as the narrator invites his fantasy lover to “leave petty reality behind,” DeRiso gives readers a pleasant way to do the same.
A misty-eyed paean to traditional romantic bliss.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4793-0232-1
Page Count: 298
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2015
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
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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