A book which intends to be met at the level of its language but which suffers from a sustained cover-to-cover read—Gibbons’...
In these poetic fictions, the poet and translator Gibbons (Last Lake, 2016, etc.) explores the metaphysics of ordinary moments.
The 35 microfictions in this slender book absorb the reader in the environs of a lakefront city that can only be Chicago and its sprawling suburban hinterlands, with an almost reverential attention to their detail. In “Mekong Restaurant, 1986,” the reader is encouraged to notice with fresh eyes the glitter of broken glass in the “raw weedy vacant lots…like sequins on fields of ragged green and crumbling gray.” In the masterful “Near the Spring Branch,” a man remembers the landscape of his youth and thinks of all the lost empty space that would once have made the minor gestures of nature—a small sinkhole, a killdeer’s track—worthy of both notice and record. Read separately, and with enough care and attention to let their minor notes ring clear, these stories swell with the tender grace of the everyday; however, as a whole the collection cannot sustain the dreamlike mimicry of its tone. “Time Out!” and “Courthouse,” for example, rely on language play seen nowhere else in the book. “A Man in a Suit” and “Persephon? at Home” both charm as individual stories but introduce an element of speculative fiction—the man in the suit materializes from a blob of glup outside a convenience store; Persephone is that Persephone unhappily homemaking in the underworld—that is jarring when paired with the more restrained psychological regionalism of the rest of the texts. Yet, in spite of whatever awkwardness the collection suffers as a book in toto, there is never a moment in these pieces which breaks the reader's total immersion in Gibbons’ characters or those characters' equal immersion in the singular moments of their lives. Here is truth so close to beauty and beauty so close to truth as to make no difference which came first.
A book which intends to be met at the level of its language but which suffers from a sustained cover-to-cover read—Gibbons’ most recent stories are best savored singularly.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942683-49-0
Page Count: 132
Publisher: BOA Editions
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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