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WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS

Darkly comic, subtle, and thoughtful about geopolitics...and cringe-inducing whenever it turns to romance or the erotic.

Book critic Al-Shawaf's first novel, set in the tumultuous aftermath of 9/11, is an often fascinating, sometimes funny picaresque about ethnic, religious, and national identities and the ways we wear them, shed them, embrace them, redefine them.

The novel opens on Sept. 12, 2001. Hunayn, an Iraqi-born Chaldean Christian educated in Rome and Beirut, lives in Orlando and attends the University of Central Florida. Casting about for someone to talk to about the implications of the attacks for people who look like him (Hunayn is neither Muslim nor Arab, but he fears such distinctions won't matter), he goes to visit his friend Hashem—and finds him rehearsing his deportation, having enlisted a neighbor to burst into his apartment and give him just five minutes to throw on clothes and gather belongings. But that's not what happens; instead, America's slide into the hypervigilant, skeptical, xenophobic (or in some cases clumsily xenophilic) state Hunayn calls "Septemberland" takes time, and what he faces, with one horrendous exception, isn't violent discrimination. Instead, America slowly retreats toward fear, tribalism, and the unwillingness or inability to engage with the "foreign," especially the Middle Eastern foreign. In time, Hunayn decamps for Lebanon, which is no less chaotic and no less riven by religious tensions but where he feels more at home and less alone—only to have that country, too, descend into war. Meanwhile, he is casting about for a profession, working as a freelance critic, a journalist, a teacher. The novel's strength is in Hunayn's sustained meditation on the costs and benefits of ethnic, religious, and national identity and on the complexities of geopolitics. Much less persuasive—and often off-puttingly porny—is the parallel narrative of Hunayn's sexual coming-of-age.

Darkly comic, subtle, and thoughtful about geopolitics...and cringe-inducing whenever it turns to romance or the erotic.

Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-62371-977-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Interlink

Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

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

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THE SECRET HISTORY

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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