Butor's self-styled ``caprice,'' first published in 1967 in France, is an autobiographical fiction in vintage nouveau roman style—though the refracted, elliptical, thickly descriptive narrative isn't all that ``new'' anymore. A sense of mystery pervades Butor's (after The Spirit of Mediterranean Places, 1986, etc.) slim book, which is filled with huge parenthetical asides and occult allusions. A certain Doctor H- -, a ``master of ghosts,'' befriends the young author, whose name (Butor) means ``furniture'' in Hungarian. Attending a lycÇe course (on the problem of God) in Paris during the Occupation opens a whole new world to the narrator, a world of artists and intellectuals, a world in which he is ``an ape.'' He reminds us that Toth, the Egyptian god of writing, was often portrayed as an ape, so when he begins a long dream sequence, we are to understand his literal transformation as an ape. Meanwhile, Doctor H— refers him for a job in Franconia teaching Count W— how to read French. At the Count's castle, the young man immerses himself in texts- -alchemical treatises, The Thousand and One Nights, records of executions—all quoted from liberally. A strange card game repeats itself in the manner of the trick in Last Year at Marienbad. And interspersed throughout are the narrator's dreams of dreams from those years—fabulistic interludes in which a vampire turns him into an ape who stuns everyone by writing in the style of Hegel, Marx, and Jakob Bîhme. Amidst much shape-shifting and many monsters, he becomes secretary to the rector of a university. It all ends in an incendiary heap and a mysterious promise to head for Egypt. It's easy to see from this dense but unrewarding text why the French New Wave in fiction is now left to academics, who may have a penchant for such pointless curiosities.
Pub Date: July 15, 1995
ISBN: 1-56478-077-5
Page Count: 123
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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