Art imitates life, or life imitates art, or something.
A novel about a novelist who has apparently obliterated the distinction between life and literature.
The narrator, a writer named Christoph, enjoyed breakthrough success with a novel detailing his romance with an actress named Magdalena. He had arrived at a crossroads, in both his relationship and his fiction, where he felt he had to choose between romantic happiness and literary fulfillment. The novel which had begun as a love story thus became a story of that love falling apart. “I didn’t wreck my life...I decided in favor of literature, and made certain sacrifices,” he explains to a younger woman named Lena, which is, of course, short for Magdalena. She is also an actress and is in love with an aspiring writer named Chris, who appears to be writing the same novel that Christoph had already written. What’s going on here? Lena thinks she knows: “There are simple explanations for everything, she said in a cheery voice. What’s that then? I asked. You’re mad, and this is all a product of your imagination.” Maybe so, but, if so, Lena might also be a product of the novelist’s imagination, and perhaps Magdalena as well, just as all of these characters are the products of the imagination of the Swiss novelist who has made a career out of such literary postmodern gamesmanship (All Days Are Night, 2014, etc.). This novel we’re reading might well be the same one the fictional novelist has written, or is rewriting, the one that brought him the breakthrough success, the one that he could never follow with another. This is the novel he is explaining in great detail to Lena, in short chapters alternating with other short chapters that detail what is going on between them, and what is going on between her and her Chris, and what parallels there are between these lives they are leading and the life with Magdalena that inspired his novel some 15 years earlier. “Maybe I was just imagining everything,” the novelist as narrator ponders at one point, recalling a period of his life that “was all so long ago now that it seemed unreal in my memory, like a bad dream on waking up.”
Art imitates life, or life imitates art, or something.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59051-979-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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