A smartly turned and admirably consistent collection about love and its many discontents.
Dysfunctional relationships of many stripes—crumbling marriages, bad dates, slacker partners—drive this dark and quirky clutch of stories.
Moshfegh’s most remarkable talent early in her career is to turn distasteful domestic situations into magnetic storytelling: her superb debut novel, Eileen (2015), is a Highsmith-ian tale of alcoholism, abuse, and unrequited love, and though the 14 stories in this collection don’t let much more sunlight in, their concision and gallows humor do give them a lift. In “The Beach Boy,” a longtime married couple returns from a vacation, and when the wife suddenly dies, her undeveloped vacation photos force the husband to reassess his understanding of her (did she really hook up with a prostitute?) and himself. In “A Dark and Winding Road,” a well-off man runs into his reprobate brother’s meth-smoking girlfriend, a meeting that proves (in quintessentially Moshfegh-ian phrasing) “disgusting—just as I’d always hoped it to be.” Youngsters are no more or less foolish, like the aspiring actor in “Nothing Ever Happens Here” who falls for his aging landlord, the broke Brooklyn hipster in “Dancing in the Moonlight” who schemes to seduce a high-end furniture designer, or the narrator of “The Weirdos” who can’t quite extract herself from her boorish boyfriend. For all these foibles, though, Moshfegh never approaches her characters from a position of cruelty, with an intention to mock them; they are for the most part ordinary people undone by their desires, just in more peculiar and Day-Glo fashion than everyday life. Moshfegh's prose is usually plainly realist, but “Mr. Wu,” about a man who devises a complex scheme to seduce a woman running a Chinese internet cafe, is a piercing fable of unrequited love. “Life can be strange sometimes, and knowing it can be doesn’t seem to make it any less so,” one character says, and Moshfegh has proven herself more willing than her contemporaries to dive into the muck of that strangeness.
A smartly turned and admirably consistent collection about love and its many discontents.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56288-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing...
Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.
Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef. And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from a Taliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending.
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of Afghan culture too: irresistible.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-245-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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