Pleasantly weird, but not electrifying.
Thirteen travelers stranded in an Asian airport spin 13 fantastical tales to while away the long night.
In what is billed as a first novel but which readers are more likely to see as so many loosely knit stories, a snowstorm in Tokyo forces an international flight to put down at an airport somewhere in Asian flyover country. All but 13 of the passengers find lodging in a nearby city where a summit meeting has attracted armies of reporters and protesters, leaving bookings unusually tight. When the airport employees abandon the unbooked to spend a sleepless night in waiting-room chairs, the travelers huddle together and agree to the proposal of a Japanese salaryman to amuse each other with stories. By stupendous coincidence, everyone in the group has at the ready a slightly fabulous yarn for the telling. Such unity as there is to these tales comes from the multinational Dasgupta’s ability to insert in most of the fables some form of magic suitable for a 21st century already full of wireless conveniences and stupendous TV screens. In the first, a provincial tailor is unlucky enough to be landed with a visit from a carload of dissolute Saudi-ish aristocrats, whose princely leader admires the tailor’s work enough to order up an outfit so luxurious that it bankrupts its maker and turns out to be undeliverable. In one of the longer tales, an Indian techno-zillionaire with the rupees to buy fertility for his sterile Bollywood-star wife becomes the father of twins whom he separates at birth when he finds the male twin too physically grotesque to keep. The beautiful female twin, fecund in the extreme, unites under profoundly weird circumstances with her brother after he has become a bizarre TV star. In another story of child abandonment, an unwanted baby becomes a seamstress whose beautifully stitched bedcovers have miraculous powers, goes to work and falls disastrously in love in an S&M bordello in Warsaw. And, finally, a Bangladeshi seaman coughs up a bird that walks across Europe to find the seaman’s ladylove.
Pleasantly weird, but not electrifying.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-7009-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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