By no means a negligible book, but something of a disappointment coming from the gifted Grushin.
The line of the title serves as bold metaphor in this earnest successor to The Dream Life of Sukhanov (2006).
It’s a literal waiting line that forms outside a kiosk which, rumor has it, offers whatever the hopeful patrons who enter it each day, enduring numerous confusions and delays, most desire. Some declare that there are tickets on sale there, to a forthcoming concert at which émigré composer Igor Selinsky (a fictional surrogate for 20th-century master Stravinsky) will conduct a performance of his final symphony. This possibility excites the interest of Anna, a compassionate schoolteacher who wants the ticket for her frail, aged mother, a one-time famous ballerina; Anna’s husband Sergei, a devoted musician unhappily underemployed as a tuba player in a nondescript marching band; and their teenaged son Alexander, a budding pragmatist who plots ways of escaping from his family’s suffocating environment—a city much like Moscow, nearly 40 years after “the Change” (known historically as the Thaw) that promised Russian citizens increased freedom and opportunity. The combination of these elements produces a frustrating mixture: excessive recourse to scenes in which characters keep meeting in line, forming both fruitful and damaging new relationships, chagrined to realize they’re animals subjected to herding and confinement. This is balanced and ameliorated by sharp characterizations of the four principal characters, trenchant analysis of the extremes of behavior to which they’re driven, and powerful evocations of an imprisoning atmosphere that stifles all forms of creativity and self-expression. Virtually every time Grushin’s characters leave the line, connecting with their memories, their ambitions or their relationships with others, the novel quickens to life. Unfortunately, the image of the line usurps the reader’s concentration, forcing the author to keep re-establishing these people’s claims on our attention.
By no means a negligible book, but something of a disappointment coming from the gifted Grushin.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15616-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Marian Wood/Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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