Highly imaginative but unfortunately titled and depressing from first page to last, the novel won’t send anyone rushing to...
Kluge chronicles the overlapping lives of strangers who travel to Saipan and find an America they never expected.
George Griffin is a disillusioned travel writer whose latest book proposal isn’t exactly working out the way he wanted. Stephanie Warner is an academic running away from a failed marriage. Mel Brodie, a Jewish businessman, and Khan, a Bangladeshi worker, round out the core cast of characters arriving on the same flight, each hoping to find on the South Pacific island of Saipan the something that’s missing from their lives. Home to fierce fighting in World War II, Saipan became a U.S. Commonwealth, but other than the title, there is very little about the small island that speaks to the American way of life. With a tropical climate blanketing the ruins of a war fought many decades ago and the remnants of failed motels and industrial buildings littering the roads, the island speaks to immigrants looking to better their situations. Many of them find exactly the opposite, working in jobs where they are treated like slaves, earning barely enough to survive. While the island’s residents like to tout the place as paradise, one person spends much of his time bursting that bubble. Known for reasons Kluge never fully explains as the Master Blaster, this rebel maintains a website that critically examines Saipan, leading to threats and attempts to unmask his identity. Kluge’s story, told in turn by the different travelers, traces the intersection of his characters’ lives and how they relate both to one another and to Saipan. The writing is right on the mark, with the author migrating effortlessly from one point of view to another. And the characters interact plausibly, their stories overlapping almost imperceptibly, but the picture he paints of Saipan is depressing: In Kluge’s hands the island becomes a down-on-its-luck Paradise wannabe that exists only to bilk migrants of their dreams.
Highly imaginative but unfortunately titled and depressing from first page to last, the novel won’t send anyone rushing to book a vacation on the island of Saipan.Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59020-322-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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