One wonders why Evans bothered sending his American lovers-to-be all the way to Italy when they could have just fallen in...
Richard Paul Evans teaches us how to love again.
Perhaps figuring that not quite enough has been written about the bellissimo Italian countryside and the ability of two damaged individuals to find love in spite of all obstacles, author Evans (The Locket, 1998, etc.) presents the story of Ross and Eliana. Once called Ellen back in her small Utah town, Eliana is now the wife of Maurizio, the Italian who swept her off her feet before becoming a philandering pig, and the mother of sweet, asthmatic Alessio. Ross Story (yes, that’s right) is an American with a Dark Secret who comes to the Chianti countryside after wandering Italy In Search of Himself. Once an ad exec back in Minneapolis, Ross now conducts tours of the Uffizi museum and lives next door to Eliana. She’s trapped in her marriage—Maurizio won’t divorce her and says that even if she leaves, the sexist Italian court system won’t let her take Alessio with her—and Ross seems to have a lot on his mind too (though exactly what isn’t revealed until dramatically necessary). A chaste flirtation between Ross and Eliana (helped along by the fact that Maurizio’s stereotypical self is always out of town sleeping with other women) blossoms into a chaste romance, Maurizio’s Passionate Mediterranean Soul burns with jealousy, every woman in the land swoons over the strong but sensitive Ross and the spirit of God is ever present over all the gentle goings-on. There are also enough Italian tips to stock a good pocket-sized phrasebook and some bottled art-history lessons that don’t overly tax the brain (Ross is a tour guide, after all).
One wonders why Evans bothered sending his American lovers-to-be all the way to Italy when they could have just fallen in love in the States, but no matter. Either way, this shameless wallow is just begging to be mocked.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94696-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
