Sad and discouraging for anyone holding out hope for that part of the world.
War-wracked Beirut in the days just before the Israeli invasion is the setting for this bitter novel, the author’s debut, about the death of friendship and the death of a small nation.
Most Americans have probably forgotten the rotten mess engendered by sectarian hatred in Lebanon in the 1980s, but they will quickly recognize the carnage and savagery laid on in this harsh small story—it’s just like today’s war, and just as awful. Bassam, the narrator, and George, nicknamed De Niro, are two young Christians practicing some not-very-serious crime and trying to get dates in their Christian neighborhood, where the water has largely stopped running and the electricity is fitful. Bassam’s father is dead and George’s father vanished early on, and the neighborhood men have been sucked into the sectarian militias that are engaged in constant battle for control of the little country where Muslims and Christians used to coexist in commercial harmony. George is the more serious of the two, a little older, a little more thoughtful and a little more mysterious. Bassam, even when the bombs and shells are dropping, has his mind on the possibilities of sex, either with George’s sexy aunt Nabila or with Rana, a young neighborhood beauty. As the war continues, so does the disintegration of their old life. Bassam’s mother dies, forcing him to lurch painfully into adulthood. And it becomes clear that George has become entangled with the local warlord and will be ever more involved in the bloody civil war. The political and personal situation gets worse when the Israelis invade and George becomes a fatal part of the war’s darkest hour. In the book’s final third, Bassam flees to Paris with orders from Nabila to find George’s father, a search that will reveal new tragedies.
Sad and discouraging for anyone holding out hope for that part of the world.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58195-223-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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