Many American readers know altogether too little about what’s happening to the north. And, to judge by this volume, what’s...
A welcome collection of short fiction from the winners of the Journey Prize, Canada’s take on something like the Pushcart (though with a nicer purse).
Now in its 25th year, the Journey Prize is awarded annually to “an emerging writer of distinction,” with $10,000 to the winner. Moreover, the annual prize story volume is considered the “most prestigious annual fiction anthology in the country.” Certainly, this anniversary collection, judged by past prizewinner Hill, along with National Post Books Editor Medley and novelist Wangersky, shows why. Noting that the submissions are read blind, making the Journey “as pure a prize as you’ll find in Canada,” the editors lead off with a decidedly fugitive piece by Laura Legge, which closes with a lovely bit of poetry: “I feel I could float with the tide, lay back and let it move me, like a sprig of sea kelp, like a caravel skimming some long corridor of blue, easily, with the sun as its sentinel.” That would do Leonard Cohen proud, and readers will be eager to hear more from her. Another selection, by Natalie Morrill, takes an original if typographically challenging approach to depicting voices speaking at once (three parallel columns, one for each voice present), and voices spoken in crisis at that. In another, Doretta Lau nicely subverts ethnic stereotypes over the battlefield of a communal meal: “I looked around at the table. Yellow Peril was slurping up her noodles with gusto. Riceboy was shoveling rice into his mouth like a champion competitive eater, while Suzie Wrong took big gulps of her drink.” There’s not a dud here, though, it being Canada, there’s plenty of snow (for which see especially Jay Brown’s well-observed story “The Egyptians”).
Many American readers know altogether too little about what’s happening to the north. And, to judge by this volume, what’s happening in Canada is all to the good.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4736-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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