Words as musical notes, a book as symphony—so it is with this debut novel, occasionally rippling with pidgin English and yet always sparkling with literary insights, all set within the landscape of a forgotten corner of South America.
A young writer from India travels to Guyana to report on a cricket tournament, and he becomes fascinated by the country, with its mixture of Chinese, Indian, Portuguese and African cultures. He soon returns for a year's stay, seeking a thing he cannot articulate in a setting where his Indian culture was once identified as coolieman—an indentured laborer. Both intrigued and repelled, the nameless protagonist, sometimes called "Gooroo" by Guyanan friends, takes up residence in Kitty, a dilapidated Georgetown neighborhood. There he meets Baby, a "scamp," a man who lives by lies and wiles. The two set off for the interior, Guyana's violent frontier border where "porknockers" dig into the jungle seeking gold and diamonds. Bhattacharya laces his story with colloquial conversational references—bai, skunt, banna, cyan—but meanings are mostly clear in context. The narrative is also expanded by references to reggae and ska. The novel's middle portion is less character-driven, but it does present an interesting social, racial and political history woven into a visit to Guyana's coastal rice and sugarcane producing areas. The last part finds the narrator residing on vibrant Sheriff Street in Georgetown. There he meets de Jesus and Moonsammy, and tags along on a trip to Boa Vista in Brazil, which includes an illicit border crossing. He meets Jan, an exotic mixed-race beauty, and there is an immediate sexual attraction. The novel concludes with the couple traveling in Venezuela, a sometimes idyllic, sometimes ugly sojourn. Unlike the narrator, Jan knows what she wants from life, and the romantic interlude ends and the story concludes in a fashion as bitter and unsatisfying as real life sometimes can be. An exotic locale and lyrical language make for a dazzling debut.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-26585-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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