A very slim, very French novella about conspiracy, coincidence and mortality.
Celebrated in his native France for his category-defying fiction that encompasses mystery, sci-fi, fantasy and philosophy, Belletto (Dying, 2010, etc.) receives only his third English translation with a narrative that the foreword by Stacey Levin describes as “a strange jewel,” “a work that hovers mysteriously between reality and artifice, natural and supernatural,” and “a puzzle.” It opens provocatively enough: “It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt.” Such proof, which involves a dictionary, doesn’t come until the novel’s very end. Before then is the first-person narrative of a man whose wife has been murdered, leaving him with a 6-year-old daughter whom he loves as his entire world. The daughter’s name is Anna, the wife was named Maria and the narrator goes unnamed, though one character refers to him as “my dear X.” The narrator lets his daughter visit with her maternal grandparents, who suspect him of having killed their daughter (and may have mixed feelings toward their granddaughter as a result). Another subplot involves a type of perpetual-motion machine, developed by the narrator’s father, which can only sustain its momentum for 24 hours. “Nothing perpetual, alas, except inertia,” says the narrator. The novel pivots on the discovery of some frozen clams in the narrator’s refrigerator, triggering his suspicion because he doesn’t know the brand and doesn’t like clams. As he starts to play amateur detective, one revelation leads to another, and the narrator finds himself at the birthday party of an old school friend, where he connects with a beautiful woman, whom nobody seems to know, and ultimately reunites with the friend’s sister, who wasn’t at the party. More mystery ensues, through what the narrator describes as a "series of coincidences and misunderstandings,” though admitting that “it was as if my mind were that of an insane person, closed to the outside world.” Fans of Paul Auster’s brand of literary gamesmanship will recognize a kindred spirit here.
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2441-4
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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