An ``imaginary memoir'' in which its author and other real people become the protagonists of fictional stories, from the prolific novelist and travel writer (Millroy the Magician, 1994; The Pillars of Hercules, 1995, etc.). It's an episodic recounting of particulars we know to be similar to the facts of Theroux's life: Peace Corps service in Africa, teaching in Singapore, longtime residence in London, and continuing critical and popular literary success. The contents are decidedly mixed. For example, a reminiscence of ``Paulie's'' eccentric Uncle Hal introduces us to a fly-by-night character too much like a male Auntie Mame to be either real or convincingly fictional; one chapter would seem to be an outtake from the author's British Isles travel book The Kingdom by the Sea (1983); and a farcical recurrence of coitus interruptus scenes appears designed to correct impressions created by Theroux's My Secret History (1989), a novel generally taken to be a confessional erotic autobiography. But there are several splendid chapters, including a keenly self-mocking account of ``Paul Theroux's'' tenure as an English teacher in a ``leper village'' in Malawi; descriptions of strained relations with a ``rapacious'' English socialite who collects and exploits young writers and with an older, enigmatic German writer; and amusingly delineated encounters with Anthony Burgess (``I never knew any writer who worked harder or was more generous''), and with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at a memorable London dinner party. If Theroux reaches no satisfactory conclusion about this passion for travel and impulse toward the condition of exile, he nevertheless writes lucidly about the process of writing—its unaccountable stops and starts, the unpredictable forms inspiration takes—and writing's influence on personality. Not one of its author's best books, but frequent infusions of wit and inventiveness rescue it from becoming (what it might otherwise have been) the Cliff's Notes version of the life and career of Paul Theroux. (First serial to the New Yorker & Granta; Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-82527-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
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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