A scandalous artifact from an earlier age that has more mileage than one might expect from an experimental novel more than a...
An ailing iconoclast, driven to despair by his own ennui, retreats to the Pyrenees for a rest cure.
Film critic and translator Vicari (Male Bisexuality in Current Cinema, 2011, etc.) offers a distinctly modern translation of this turn-of-the-century expressionist novel by the avant-garde French novelist Mirbeau (A Chambermaid’s Diary, 1900, etc.). By using contemporary references and giving the language a florid, conversational tone, Vicari rescues the work from its own artifice and lets its arch humor breathe in a way that might not have come through in a more conventional translation. The narrator is Georges Vasseur, a cynic whose weariness with the world has saddled him with “neurasthenia,” an antiquated diagnosis that would today be likened to anxiety, depression, or neurosis. In short vignettes, Vasseur describes his days at a sanitarium high in the mountains near the Iberian border. Mirbeau uses the framework to offer pointed criticisms of the politics, culture, and social structure of the Third Republic, peppering his text with real-life figures from the age. Vasseur’s friends include Robert Hagueman, a lusty character who could just as easily occupy a Beat novel, and Clara Fistula, an adolescent transgendered genius who preaches asexuality. The novel is acidly funny, though it takes work to understand the context of some of Mirbeau’s acerbic wit. That said, some passages are timeless, like the early fragment where Vasseur adopts a hedgehog that quickly succumbs to its owner’s decadent lifestyle. “Total alcoholic inebriation. Cause of death: dropsy. An unprecedented case among hedgehogs,” writes Georges’ doctor. The novel gets to some dark places as its narrator plunges deeper into depression, but Mirbeau’s mischievous humor and keen observations about uncertainty as the cause of existential anxiety have much to offer contemporary readers who are willing to take the plunge.
A scandalous artifact from an earlier age that has more mileage than one might expect from an experimental novel more than a century old.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-030-2
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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