To quote the Professor: “Time is a clutter . . . and it needs to be sorted out.” So is, so does Gazelle.
Muted characterization and action and a voluptuous superabundance of arcane hocus-pocus: such are the keynotes of this febrile eighth novel from the writer-painter whose earlier, much similar fiction includes The Complete Butcher’s Tales (1994) and Phosphor in Dreamland (1995).
The story’s narrated in retrospect by Elizabeth, a trained anatomist who specializes in examining mummified bodies, 20 years after she had lived in Cairo with her “Professor” father (bankrolled by a Fulbright grant) and epically promiscuous Icelandic mother. “Mother,” a sexual force of nature devoid of moral scruples, ran through multiple lovers, seeking her ideal Egyptian man: “the gazelle type.” The Professor, an expert in the mechanics of poisoning (whose book The Ethics of War had attracted CIA interest), and a hitherto strictly “rational” man, drowned his grief in chess games reimagined as historic battles with master parfumier Ramses Ragab. As always, Ducornet conjures up fragrant excerpts from texts both real (The Arabian Nights) and imaginary (the “licentious” Garden of Semblance and Lies, the writings of alchemist Athanasius Kirchner, who studied Egyptian hieroglyphics in hopes of creating an encyclopedic summa of human experience). Rather late in the game, things do begin to happen, as the Professor summons a magician to bring back his vagrant wife (she does return, after mumbling incantations replete with dark cosmic clichés—but she stays only for breakfast). Meanwhile, Elizabeth's awakened sexuality leads her to intimacy with secrets possessed and conjured by Ramses Ragab, independence from both her mother's destructive sexuality and her father's abdication from reality, and—on shipboard, as she and the Professor, having abandoned all hope, return to America—the “gazelle man” who makes her a woman (“my heart thrashed like an eel under the net of his eyes”). Ducornet's aphoristic élan makes all this nonsense agreeably smooth, if insubstantial and arbitrary.
To quote the Professor: “Time is a clutter . . . and it needs to be sorted out.” So is, so does Gazelle.Pub Date: July 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41124-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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
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
© 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.
