Allegorical but matter-of-fact: a fine debut, layered with meaning and shades of sorrow.
Winner of Finland’s highest literary honor for best debut novel, an elegant, allegorical portrait of lives lived at the margin, minorities within minorities in a new land.
Bekim is Muslim and gay, the son of a woman who left fragmenting Yugoslavia with her domineering, moody husband for a new life in Finland. Now, in Helsinki, where Bekim is not entirely at home though a productive citizen, he has come into the orbit of a talking cat who sucks down alcohol and has any number of dislikes and—well, pet peeves. “Gays. I don’t much like gays,” says the cat, before amending the remark to, “Obviously, I like all kinds of toms, but I hate bitches!” That explains the cat’s presence in a gay bar, perhaps, but it does nothing to relieve Bekim’s angst, especially when the cat hisses that no one will ever love him. His mother, Emine, meanwhile, has grown from an utterly ordinary person, “only pretty and good at housework, or so I’d been told,” as she says, to a self-aware woman who finally frees herself from a bad marriage and a life where “our entire existence hung on our children who had decided to have nothing to do with us.” Statovci’s characters might prefer to live quietly on the sidelines, but events in Kosovo overturn their lives, even from afar; witnessing one in a long series of atrocities on the news, Emine concludes, “God did nothing with that child because there was no God.” Strangers in an uncomprehending new home, Statovci’s actors make do, alert for possibilities of happiness, however unattainable. Statovci doesn’t quite make full use of his fantastic cat; though he invests his creation with plenty of personality, Statovci lacks Mikhail Bulgakov’s flair for satirical meaning-making through the use of animal characters. As it is, though, the creature turns out to be a complex character, tormented as well as a tormentor. And that’s not to speak of Bekim’s pet snake, who has dangerous ideas of his own.
Allegorical but matter-of-fact: a fine debut, layered with meaning and shades of sorrow.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-87182-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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