The urban intellectual thriller is Auster’s game, but he played it to superior effect in The Book of Illusions (2002)....
A blocked novelist lives through a labyrinthine challenge to his artistic conviction that “[t]here was no connection between imagination and reality,” in Auster’s teasing, tricky 11th novel.
Narrator Sidney Orr relates (in a text that includes detailed footnotes) a series of inexplicably connected events occurring in 1982, following a near-fatal illness for which he was hospitalized for months. Recovering slowly, Orr purchases a handsome blue notebook from a Brooklyn stationery store, and finds that possessing it stimulates him to devise a work based on a Dashiell Hammett story. It’s a dark fable of flight and captivity, containing within it a novel (entitled Oracle Night) whose theme will be the destructive effect of the gift of prophecy. In a spare style by now honed into an instrument of Nabokovian precision, Auster moves adroitly from Orr’s own “captivity” by the story he’s compelled to write to enigmatic real-life relationships with his pregnant (and, suddenly, mysterious) wife Grace, his older author friend and mentor John Trause (a longtime friend of Grace’s family), Trause’s sociopathic pothead son Jacob, and the elusive stationery-store proprietor Mr. Chang, who’s as affable and menacing as a Sax Rohmer villain. There’s also a subplot featuring black WWII veteran Ed Victory, who lives in a manner that pays explicit homage to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—oh, and an aborted screenplay for a remake of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, and a vintage Warsaw telephone directory. Much of this is quite entertaining, but the story’s pay, though fully explanatory, is disappointing. Too many loose narrative ends are left dangling, and the “mystery” of the blue notebook (which Orr pointedly describes as “a place of trouble for me”) is never confronted.
The urban intellectual thriller is Auster’s game, but he played it to superior effect in The Book of Illusions (2002). Oracle Night, fascinating as it is, is a lesser performance.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7320-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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