Nassar is tremendously adept at capturing the existential anguish of a troubled mind. It’s not easy or uplifting reading,...
A prodigal son’s homecoming gives ample reason to think that everyone might have been better off if he’d just stayed away.
Brazilian writer Nassar is being rediscovered in his own country, where, though never quite forgotten, he fell into near silence for 40 years following the publication of this novel and its companion novella, A Cup of Rage. During that time, he retreated to the countryside, where he grew up and took to farming. In this slender story, young André has followed much the same course, having tired of his father’s sternly pious ways and gone off to the big city to try to make a life there. It didn’t work: “The happiness I had imagined existed beyond our father’s realm was no more than an illusion.” André is a study in torment, and what torments him the most is a decidedly unhealthy attachment to his sister, Ana: “Ana was my illness, she was my insanity, my air, my splinter and chill, my breath, the impertinent insistence in my testicles.” Well, now. When he is not warding off thoughts of Ana, he is out in the sheepfolds and livestock pens, carefully eyeing the “smug nanny-goat” or trying to dissuade his siblings from taking his example and heading off to the metropolis themselves; confesses one to André, perhaps improbably, “I want to be known in the brothels and in the alleys where tramps sleep, I want to do lots of different things, be generous with my own body….” Ah, but that way trouble lies. Nassar’s story has all the gloominess of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms, and it’s just as packed with allusion to classical mythology and literature, as when, in closing, André’s mother cries out “an ancient lament that to this day can still be heard along the poor Mediterranean coast” even if it issues from the Brazilian rain forest.
Nassar is tremendously adept at capturing the existential anguish of a troubled mind. It’s not easy or uplifting reading, but his dark view of the world commands attention.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2656-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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