Nobelist Mahfouz offers here a slender, magical parable of idealism and compromise through a stylized Middle East odyssey, first published in Arabic in 1983. Thwarted in marriage when his fiancee is claimed by the sultan's chamberlain, Qindil Muhammad al-Innabi, called Ibn Fattouma, resolves to go on a pilgrimage to the storied land of Gebel. The tale of his travels is a tale of detours. Passing through the moon-worshipping land of Mashriq, he stays for several years with lightsome Arousa, but is exiled for sharing his Muslim religion with their children. When Hairs, a police state where Fattouma has been staying, conquers Mashriq, he purchases Arousa in a slave auction, but again his bride catches the eye of an influential advisor, and he is sentenced to life imprisonment for speaking out against the advisor. Released after 20 years by another war, he travels to Halba—a land of complete freedom that seems a sly portrait of America—and takes another wife; the reappearance of Arousa, though, reproaches him with his inconstancy to his pilgrimage, and he sets out for Aman, the land of perfect justice whose price is total conformity. Increasingly disillusioned in his nation's betrayal of Muslim beliefs, Fattouma follows Arousa to Ghuroub, where he attaches himself to a holy man who tries to prepare him for the journey to Gebel, but more fighting forces him to press on prematurely, and it is unclear from the ending of his journal whether he ever reaches his elusive goal. What is clear is the simple charm with which Mahfouz dramatizes fundamental questions about tolerance, love, and mortality while condensing a lifetime's worth of experience into 160 pages. Mahfouz is widely considered the most Western of contemporary Arab novelists, but the closest Western analogue here—Pilgrim's Progress starring Sinbad the Sailor—only reinforces the distance between East and West. Still, an ideal introduction to Mahfouz for readers put off by the Cairo Trilogy's expansive length.
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-42323-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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