Gordimer (The Pickup, 2001, etc.) can still deliver a rabbit punch to the solar plexus as efficiently as anybody now...
The collision of personal and political agendas and ideals is analyzed with radiant precision and wit in the 1991 Nobel laureate’s ninth collection: eight adamantine stories and two ambitious novellas.
Several of the former are commandingly terse, including the parabolic title story, in which an earthquake reveals both a cluttered ocean floor and the consequences in store for “scavengers” who scurry to its depths; a wry tale of inchoate sexual surrender (“The Diamond Mine”); the monologue of an assassin visiting the grave of his widely beloved victim (“Homage”); and a mordant peek at the transitory nature of earthly pleasures seen in the context of a malarial mosquito’s lurking presence (“An Emissary”). Gordimer’s underappreciated comic gift sparkles in “The Generation Gap,” a beautifully handled tale showing how adult children react when their aging father leaves their mother for a much younger woman. It’s a rich revelation of generational and gender incompatibility and miscommunication, which ends with a jolt as Gordimer engineers a sudden shift of viewpoint. She’s a brilliant technician, as evidenced by a masterly style that blends serpentine discursive sentences with crisp, clipped fragments: the effect is of a roving intelligence constantly surprised, and stimulated to further exploration, by its own insights. Her methods work to near-perfection in the novellas “Karma,” in which a deceased insurance executive’s spirit makes successive returns to earth (as, e.g., a male, a female, a stillborn baby) “to continue his experience in another place, time”; and in its counterpart, “Mission Statement,” the story of a middle-aged Englishwoman, Roberta Blayne, who works for an international aid agency in an impoverished African nation, where she has a sexual relationship with a native “Deputy Director of Land Affairs”—but declines the opportunity to become his “second wife.” The tale’s an amazingly compact study of racial and social divisions and their stifling denial of individual freedom.
Gordimer (The Pickup, 2001, etc.) can still deliver a rabbit punch to the solar plexus as efficiently as anybody now writing. Maybe they should give her the Nobel Prize again.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-19090-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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