An eerie tale that could have been ponderous and flat but, instead, goes completely over the edge and becomes outrageous and...
A kind of postmodern Grand Hotel, in which Power (The Good Remains, 2002, etc.) wanders through the public and private rooms of a Washington hotel where “people come, people go, nothing ever happens.”
The Royale Hotel in Washington, DC, caters to its guests, but it’s more of a home to its employees. Many of them are immigrants, like the Iraqi plumber Jedra Abdullah, who roams the building night and day searching for leaks to plug. Jedra is secretly in love with Phyllis, the all-American girl who works the front desk, but he’s too shy to take a step in her direction—until they find themselves both trapped in a broken elevator. The Iranian engineer Khouri Karimi, who stays at the hotel while attending a conference, is equally bewitched by his chambermaid Patricia, a single mother who lives with her young son and takes poetry classes at the Y. Their relationship (Patricia eventually agrees to marry Khouri) seems just as unlikely Jedra and Phyllis’s, but the Royale appears to be full of odd couples: Even Lloyd Bostitch, the obsessive, humorless and thoroughly gay manager of the hotel’s cocktail lounge falls into bed with one of his new waitresses and discovers what it’s like to have his heart broken by a woman. The strangest pairing of all brings hotel chef Leslie Downing into the arms of reclusive tenant Daniel Espirito, who lives by himself in the hotel penthouse and believes that he’s back in his childhood home in Brazil. Leslie agrees to cook some Brazilian dishes for Daniel and succeeds so well that he becomes convinced that she’s the family servant who kidnapped, seduced and initiated Daniel into a voodoo cult when he was a little boy. This delusion turns into a Proustian pleasure of the highest order for Daniel—and, weirder still, turns out to fulfill Leslie’s sexual and career fantasies alike. Someone’s gotta tell Expedia about this place.
An eerie tale that could have been ponderous and flat but, instead, goes completely over the edge and becomes outrageous and delightful.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58243-303-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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