An expansive and heartfelt but overly random novel-cum-historical account.
An esteemed Egyptian novelist and her fictional alter ego look back at the tumultuous past, reflecting on the resilience and deep-seated sorrow of the Palestinian people.
Part novel, part memoir, part historical/political screed and part rumination on the writing process, the book, first published in Arabic in 1999, is a literary juggling act. To start with, it is a first-person novel by and about Radwa, a professor of literature, called Specters. Inside that novel, a history teacher, Shagar, is writing a nonfiction history book, also called Specters. Ashour also intrudes directly to remark on the storytelling process, and the intersections of fiction and reality, past and present. There are enough plot elements, and enough leaps back and forth in time, for an epic film: civil disobedience, imprisonments, hospitalizations, assassinations, suicides, Kafkaesque bureaucracies, love, romance and exile. The focal point for both Radwa and Shagar is a tragic 1948 incident in which dozens of civilians in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin were brutally killed by Israeli paramilitary forces. Like other violence perpetrated in the book, it is referred to as a massacre, a judgment with which some but not all historical accounts agree. The sense of loss and mistreatment that permeates the pages is deep, and the author's outrage is frequently justified. But by writing of Israelis and Jews in general with great anger and disgust (Ariel Sharon is described as "the fat man who loved dogs but hated Arabs"), while making no mention of the terrorism inflicted on them by Palestinians for decades, Ashour loses sympathy and credibility. For all the energy and ingenuity that went into the complicated structure, the design achieves little. At various points, the author only confuses the reader as to which character is doing what at a given time.
An expansive and heartfelt but overly random novel-cum-historical account.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56656-832-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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