The warmth and romance of this novel will make cynics smile.
Korean writer Park’s new novel examines the mysteries of attraction and the falsehoods of beauty.
“Write about something pretty,” Park’s narrator, an aspiring writer, hears from a friend—but the narrator lives his life in revolt against the beautiful, having seen how aesthetics wrecked his family when his movie-star father drifted away in favor of glitz. For this reason, perhaps, the 20-year-old narrator finds himself drawn to “the world’s ugliest woman,” a sweet person his own age who works with him. Although ugliness is one of the novel’s themes, Park’s work is anything but. The novel glitters with poetic language (“Her three words, I love you, were [a] blade of grass”), often blanketing the characters in snow, making the novel feel hushed and still—a story told in a whisper late at night while, elsewhere, people try to sleep. Park’s novel has a youthful wisdom that occasionally borders on the pretentious and/or mundane, as youthful wisdom often does. “This world is one big sham,” says a young man named Yohan, the narrator’s friend and the third major character. This idea of sham isn’t an unfamiliar sentiment in novels about young people, but what Park occasionally lacks is a perspective on this sort of philosophizing; does he find it naïve, astute, absurd or what? This is a small complaint, however, about a book that works, more than anything, like music, with the lyrics of specific songs (particularly “Strawberry Fields Forever”) woven through the pages like a soundtrack. (One might recall the films of Wong-Kar Wai—how they often repurpose the same two or three songs in a multitude of situations.) The ending dips too far into metafictional trickery, but the result is an oddly optimistic book about broken hearts.
The warmth and romance of this novel will make cynics smile.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62897-066-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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