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ANA IMAGINED

like Ana’s, and Anne’s, can have no end.

A novel-within-a-novel whose author chooses a Sarajevo woman glimpsed on a TV newsreel as a way of exorcising her

own long-suppressed demons. “Why Bosnia?” Anne Raynard’s friends all ask about the setting of her new novel. After all, she’s never even visited the place, and her harrowing account of Bosnia’s descent from civilization to savagery has to compete with dozens of equally harrowing novels and factual accounts. These well-meaning friends and critics, some of whom voice uncomfortably apt reservations, don’t know that Anne is using Ana Gusic, her alter ego, to project her own grief and rage—about her husband’s hellish memories of Vietnam, her father’s Alzheimer’s, her own brush with murderous violence a generation ago, and her need, despite her bookish Cambridge lifestyle, to give voice to her enduring feelings of guilt, revulsion, and terror. In drawing such insistent parallels between an American writer sheltered by wealth and safety and a Sarajevo Muslim poet watching her country torn asunder, first-novelist Ireland risks charges of presumption, inflation, and self-absorption; after all, what in Anne’s life can possibly equip her to enter into Ana’s nightmare? But Ireland proves remarkably agile and sensitive in disarming these criticisms by focusing for so long on the telltale social amenities slipping away one by one—the lack of pressed clothing, the loss of trees to fuel for freezing neighbors, the paintings of sun and moon that replace the glass in Ana’s shuttered windows, the fruitless search for insulin for her diabetic son, the bickering over the water supplies of the latest casualties—that by the time she gets to the newsreel horrors, they seem chillingly logical next steps in the degradation of Ana and her homeland. Even Ireland’s division of her unsettling evocation into a brief “beginning” and a long “middle” acknowledges that stories

like Ana’s, and Anne’s, can have no end.

Pub Date: May 1, 2000

ISBN: 1-55597-300-0

Page Count: 210

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

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THINGS FALL APART

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

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