She’s a survivor like no other, and the mixed pleasure of inhabiting her jagged psyche is the best reason for reading this...
A vividly portrayed, most unconventional protagonist dominates this punchy first novel from an award-winning British short-story writer.
She’s 30-year-old Lily O’Connor, a sufferer from temporal lobe epilepsy since early childhood, when her intemperate and unstable mother threw her down a flight of stairs. Lily tells her own story, which begins when her mother (from whom she was “taken away” following the aforementioned “accident”) dies, and Lily leaves her entry-level job taking tickets at an amusement park arcade and heads for London, seeking her two brothers. She finds—but discovers she has nothing in common with—sleek, self-absorbed Barry, a professional card player interested in nothing beyond training himself for the World Poker Open. But Mikey, the brother she loved, who had gone missing years earlier, is still nowhere to be found. Adrift in London (which she envisions as “a pile of bodies writhing like fat worms in a fisherman’s box”), Lily makes connections doomed to short-circuit: with Mel, the woman Cambridge grad and banker who takes her in (and undoubtedly loves Lily, secretly and guiltily); and with the cryptic Dave, a smug, secretive electrician (symbols clash here) who becomes her lover and abuser, echoing the pattern in which preadolescent Lily had been caught up with her mother’s creepy boyfriend Don. The details of such relationships are clichéd, and there’s too much of the social worker’s casebook in other’s observations of Lily. But whenever we’re inside her own thoughts and perceptions, the novel soars. Innovative typography helps: images of pills Lily takes, lined up in a row; skewed, distorted jumbles of letters, denoting her frequent convulsive seizures. And Lily’s voice is impressive—raw, angry, emotionally urgent, rising frequently to inchoate poetry (e.g., water in a canal runs “oily and slow …. sound[s] like treacle glooping. Stench like burnt toast”).
She’s a survivor like no other, and the mixed pleasure of inhabiting her jagged psyche is the best reason for reading this daring tightrope-walk of a novel.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7035-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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