Honest, tender, and exquisitely crafted. A novel to savor.
The award-winning author of The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006) and The Line (2010) contemplates the tension between art and domesticity.
A little girl walks into a bedroom to find a mermaid sorting through her mother’s jewelry. The mermaid knows the story of every bauble: these earrings were a gift from the czar’s uncle to the girl’s great-grandmother, a ballerina; that uncut emerald was prised from an icon during the revolution and purchased by the girl’s grandfather for a “length of smoked sausage and a box of German sweets.” In the cramped kitchen of her family’s Moscow apartment, this same girl is secretly reading forbidden verse when she meets an angel—or is he a god? “Do you want to be immortal?” he asks her. She says, “Yes.” The exhilarating opening chapters of Grushin’s latest novel are narrated by an unnamed heroine who can see through mundane reality—beneath it, beyond it—into other worlds. She is a poet. Scornful of the ordinary life her parents imagine for her, she travels from Russia to the United States. There, she experiences doomed love and the romance of suffering for one’s art. But—moment by moment, choice by choice—her commitment to immortality recedes until the passionate young poet telling her story disappears and re-emerges as “she,” a character observed from a distance, a woman who will soon come to be known as “Mrs. Caldwell.” It’s taken as a given that an upper-middle-class wife and mother cannot be an artist. There is magic, even in the suburbs; it’s just that Mrs. Caldwell can’t see it. But, at the same time, Grushin is too sly to be bound by cliché. If Mrs. Caldwell fails to be true to herself—and that “if” is sincere—this is because there are real questions about who that true self is. These are questions that women, especially, will recognize.
Honest, tender, and exquisitely crafted. A novel to savor.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98233-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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