The author’s defiance of traditional storytelling is admirable and innovative even when it falters.
Quinones’ (Starters, 2013, etc.) collection of short stories and essays features intellectual characters examining themselves and one another as well as film and literature analyses from the author himself.
There’s a stream-of-consciousness style blanketing this book, best exemplified in the first part of the two-part title story, listing 98 examples of what Quinones calls “the one sentence short story.” They’re seemingly random assertions or snippets, mostly humorous, such as, “We spend one seventh of our lives on Tuesdays.” But a similar style appears in the fiction, as well. In “The Fizz Notorio,” for example, Eve Patricia plays her lover’s answering-machine recording, which features pieces of innocuous phone conversations. Similarly, Rolando Carspidrain in “Rumor People” overhears nearby diners at a restaurant talking about their parents’ impending ends. But while the plots are minimal, the characters are profound. Eve, for one, debates her choice to be with a man twice her age, while in “Burn Series,” shiftless Kim Demando may have a more fascinating life than her more responsible sister Dixie. Notwithstanding, the most laudable tale is perhaps the most conventional: “The Exousia,” a quirky murder mystery told almost entirely through eyewitness accounts. Quinones provides neither the dead man’s name nor details of his death, and that’s the point: what readers learn about the victim becomes his legacy, regardless of whether any of it’s true. An essay on Macbeth (“Notes on MACBETH Posthumously Left Behind by an Undistinguished Scholar”) is a little uneven, beginning as an assessment of the original play before turning into a look at several cinematic interpretations, all with equal merit. The collection ends, rather appropriately, with the metafictional second part of the title story: film enthusiast Peter pines after Myla, who apparently has no interest in him. This narrative is offset by largely superfluous notes from the author citing references or inspirations, which comprise more than half the story. Occasional tangents, such as film or book reviews, don’t seem to have been adequately researched; for example, what Quinones refers to as the “J-horror [Japanese horror] film Shutter” is actually an American remake of a Thai movie.
The author’s defiance of traditional storytelling is admirable and innovative even when it falters.Pub Date: April 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9183-7
Page Count: 138
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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