Bukiet (After, 1996, etc.) portrays a gentle Messiah who may or may not have arrived to redeem the bloody 20th century. The point-of-view character here is none other than Snakes Hammurabi—Hammurabi the lawgiver but, even so, as untrustworthy as a snake. Convicted of urinating on a church altar, Hammurabi is sentenced to a surreal concrete prison, moored on the shores of the Baltic Sea like a barge. His cellmates, numbering 11, are murderers, serial killers, and Nazis—the lowest of the low. There is also a 13th man, Ben Alef, who never speaks and whose origin no one, including Ben Alef, can recall. When a storm breaks the prison from its moorings, Ben Alef comes alive, effecting their escape and walking on water ahead of them as they, marvelously, do the same. Snakes is the first to recognize that Ben Alef, a Jew, is the Messiah of prophecy who, in his brashness and professed loyalty, becomes a kind of modern Peter. With his 12 criminal disciples, Ben Alef performs various and sundry miracles, and his followers become legion, until corrupt popes and presidents pay heed. Bukiet has a good time with the New Testament: Mary Magdalene, for instance, is portrayed as a cheap hooker who, healed of her physical debilities by Ben Alef, becomes only more desirable to men, compounding her problem. Meantime, Bukiet’s Messiah is helpless, really more of an eternal victim than a savior. Caught up in the author’s vicious portrait of Disneyland as a 20th-century hell masking as heaven, Ben Alef proves unable to deliver any meaningful message. He’s “just another weakling, just another failure,” and is assassinated, leaving humankind, as the 21st century dawns, in a more godless state than ever. Entertaining, but Bukiet stacks the deck of hopelessness, never allowing his Jesus to become more than a cartoon.
Pub Date: April 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20009-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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