Nevertheless, an intelligent, earnest, and highly readable first novel.
An ambitious, bighearted debut transforms Rosenberg’s own experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Asia Minor and the American Southwest into an absorbing, if top-heavy, tale of economic crisis and cultural incompatibility.
It begins in the republic of Kyrgyzstan in the 1990s shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Ebullient Anarbek Tashtanaliev supports the two families that include his teenaged daughter Nazira and young second wife Lola by managing a “cheeseless cheese factory” that barely retains its government funding in the new age of privatization. Furthermore, Nazira narrowly escapes marriage to a local lout who claims her through the Kyrgyz tradition of bride kidnapping. Meanwhile, twentysomething drifter Jeff Hartig is forced to resign his job supervising a center for teenagers on an Arizona Apache reservation, and accepts a Peace Corps assignment teaching English in Kyrgyzstan. As Jeff’s relationship with his host family (the Tashtanalievs) grows more conflicted, his disillusioning experiences are counterpointed against those of his Apache friend Adam Dale, who moves away from the rez essentially ruled by his councilman father, attends college, then moves east—eventually hooking up with Jeff after the latter has departed Kyrgyzstan (leaving old business unfinished) and moved to Istanbul to work resettling refugees. The lengthy climax occurs in the aftermath of the massive 1999 earthquake, in which Anarbek (who had gone there to importune Jeff for money) and Nazira (who had followed her father there) are also caught up. This busy debut has much to recommend it: an authoritative grasp of the dynamics that influence underdeveloped nations and cultures; a lively narrative voice that efficiently distinguishes its characters’ contrasting natures; and notably vivid characterizations, particularly those of unstable Jeff and affable con-man Anarbek, a sensualist possessed of a Falstaffian joie de vivre. Unfortunately, the plot feels contrived, and its resolution, though in no way a happy one, exudes an unconvincing sentimental idealism.
Nevertheless, an intelligent, earnest, and highly readable first novel.Pub Date: June 16, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-38601-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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