Not as profound as it aspires to be, but great fun for those who like to match wits against a tricky author practicing some...
Sex and physics turn out to have a lot in common in the latest from Goldstein (Mazel, 1995, etc.), who depicts the tortured passions of three scientists trying to restore meaning to a relativistic universe.
Many years ago, Samuel Mallach published a paper that defied the reigning orthodoxy of quantum mechanics by asserting that objective reality existed and could be measured. This affront to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle earned him decades of invisibility; when narrator Justin Childs discovers Mallach’s work—which taps into his own distaste for “unraveling the rationality of the world” through physics—the older man is a bitter ghost relegated to teaching an elementary undergraduate course at the fancy university at which Justin has just arrived as a rising faculty star. Justin wants to work with Mallach on new equations that will vindicate this heresy; he’s even more enthusiastic when, after his first dinner at their home, Mallach’s gorgeous daughter, Dana, takes him to her room for a night of bliss. The sex is as high-falutin’ as the science; Dana’s mother, Carlotta, was a student of Tantric erotic disciplines, and Mallach believes his dead wife’s expertise is what fueled his innovations in physics. We know from Justin’s opening sentence (“The essential fact is that I hate her”) that some catastrophe has destroyed his collaboration with Mallach père and fille, but the arrogant, aggressively intellectual tone of his narration makes it hard to feel much apprehension for the clearly doomed characters. Goldstein has always been a rather chilly writer, and it takes a while for the story to develop enough momentum to overcome this emotional distance. Gradually, however, you’re pulled in by the odd anomalies in a narrative that seems to be shifting between Justin’s first-person chronicle and a more omniscient account. Goldstein ties together all the seemingly loose ends with a fabulous final plot twist far more satisfying than her sententious summing-up: “We are things that would know and we are things that would love, and oh how fused is that entanglement.”
Not as profound as it aspires to be, but great fun for those who like to match wits against a tricky author practicing some masterful sleight-of-hand.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-98659-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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
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
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