The ex-pat cafe crowd considers the life worth living in Paris.
In modern Paris, as always, a coterie of privileged, successful, attractive, dissatisfied 20–30somethings contemplate their self-worth over coffee and wine in the city of love’s countless clean, well-lighted places. Paris, in all its chaos and charm, may very well be the navel-gazing capital of the world, and so it serves appropriately as the lively setting for Simpson’s (Six Packs in South Dakota, 2011, etc.) new portrait of malcontents. School teacher Peregrine moved to Paris from America in hopes of distancing himself from his overbearing family while also searching for a deeper meaning in life. But he can’t escape—his family shows up at his doorstep unannounced, and thoughts of death consume him. Most intriguingly, Peregrine’s melancholy is colored by his toxic relationship, as a gay man, to Emma—the buxom, man-eating alpha-female who beguiles all men and women, gay and straight. A colorful cast of personalities populates the novel, each with his or her existential issues, especially Peregrine’s artful mother and his father, Arthur Woodmancy, an author famous for horror novels. Arthur takes pride in their “family fondness for literary references,” a fondness Simpson shares—he namedrops Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Austen, Hardy and many others. Simpson showcases his writing talent in the novel’s many somber, reflective passages, while maintaining a keen sense of detail and place. But attempts to make despair seem fashionable result in a vexing layer of superficial smarminess, exemplified by overcooked repartee. Even the horrific, jarring death at the novel’s center comes across as contrived, weighed down by heavy-handed metaphors. Yet the “cloud-[trek] across and through the murky pandemonium of [Peregrine’s] life” can be a captivating read, albeit as exhausting as expected when audience to a self-absorbed depressive obsessing over his life as a setting sun, unsure if it also rises. A notable effort in need of firmer footing to reach the depths it probes.
Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466201873
Page Count: 331
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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