In all instances, Drake stresses the human qualities of his emigrants, their bravery in striking out anew, their...
This marks Nick Drake's first full-length collection and includes work from his previously published pamphlet of poems entitled Chocolate and Salt. The poet, whose name conjures impressions of detective fiction from the 1930s, lives and works in London. But the vamps and villains and heroes of Drake's poems are rather tarnished figures, past their primes, as dented and battered as the baggage with which they escaped in the middle of the night. They long for lives free of the extreme politics that have ensnared generations and brought ruin to their homelands amid "Europe's concrete jigsaw, time- and war-zones." This collection is principally a tribute to the long-suffering - from those no longer comfortable in their homelands to those not at home in their bodies to those unreconciled to their fates - who pack up their broken belongings or the tatters of their sanity, seeking an idyll, as the poet puts it, "on this asylum island." But the refuge Drake's varied characters seek is not an escape from reason so much as a life-affirming flight toward reason, an embarking upon a holiday from the confining ideologies of nondemocratic Europe. He draws the obvious parallels between the refugees from Nazi Europe in the late 1930s and Soviet Europe in the late 1980s. With subtlety and humor, Drake goes on in other poems to honor those who, like the woman "shrunk into a girl with silver hair," are slowly fleeing from life toward the unmapped realm of death.
In all instances, Drake stresses the human qualities of his emigrants, their bravery in striking out anew, their transcendence, their refusal to be mere characters on "petty tyranny's B-movie set."Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2000
ISBN: 1-85224-488-7
Page Count: 62
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary...
Environmental unconcern, genetic engineering, and bioterrorism have created the hollowed-out, haunted future world of Atwood’s ingenious and disturbing 11th novel, bearing several resemblances to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).
Protagonist Jimmy, a.k.a. “Snowman,” is perhaps the only living “remnant” (i.e., human unaltered by science) in a devastated lunar landscape where he lives by his remaining wits, scavenges for flotsam surviving from past civilizations, dodges man-eating mutant predators, and remembers. In an equally dark parallel narrative, Atwood traces Jimmy’s personal history, beginning with a bonfire in which diseased livestock are incinerated, observed by five-year-old Jimmy and his father, a “genographer” employed by, first, OrganInc Farms, then, the sinister Helthwyzer Corporation. One staggering invention follows another, as Jimmy mourns the departure of his mother (a former microbiologist who clearly foresaw the Armageddon her colleagues were building), goes through intensive schooling with his brilliant best friend Glenn (who renames himself Crake), and enjoys such lurid titillations as computer games that simulate catastrophe and global conflict (e.g., “Extinctathon,” “Kwiktime Osama”) and Web sites featuring popular atrocities (e.g., “hedsoff.com”). Surfing a kiddie-porn site, Jimmy encounters the poignant figure of Oryx, a Southeast Asian girl apprenticed (i.e., sold) to a con-man, then a sex-seller (in sequences as scary and revolting as anything in contemporary fiction). Oryx will inhabit Jimmy’s imagination forever, as will the perverse genius Crake, who rises from the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute to a position of literally awesome power at the RejoovenEsense Compound, where he works on a formula for immortality, creates artificial humans (the “Children of Crake”), and helps produce the virus that’s pirated and used to start a plague that effectively decimates the world’s population. And Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000, etc.) brings it all together in a stunning surprise climax.
A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary Zamyatin’s We. Atwood has surpassed herself.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50385-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
Originally published in German in 1962 and touted more recently as a feminist's Robinson Crusoe, this somber classic from prize-winner Haushofer chronicles the experiences of a (nameless) woman cut off from her familiar city ways in a remote hunting lodge, after Armageddon has snuffed out all life in the world beyond. With the woman's diary of activities during the first two years of isolation as foundation, the story assumes the shape and flavor of a journal. Saved from instant death by a transparent, apparently indestructible wall enclosing a substantial area of forest and alpine meadow, the woman finds relief from her isolation in companionship offered by a dog, a cat, kittens, and a cow and her calf, making them into a family that she cares for faithfully and frets over incessantly with each season's new challenges. Crops of potatoes, beans, and hay are harvested in sufficient quantity to keep all alive, with deer providing occasional meat for the table, but the satisfaction of having survived long winters and a halcyon summer is undone by a second sudden and equally devastating catastrophe, which triggers the need in her to tell her story. Although heavy with the repetition of daily chores, the account is also intensely introspective, probing as deeply into the psyche of the woman as it does into her world, which circumstances have placed in a new light. Subtly surreal, by turns claustrophobic and exhilarating, fixated with almost religious fervor on banal detail, this is a disturbing yet rewarding tale in which survival and femininity are strikingly merged. Not for macho readers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-939416-53-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Cleis
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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