A tedious investigation of a dying marriage that lacks the elegance associated with the genre.
She’s taken a lover. He’s devastated. A marriage breaks up in this determinedly abstract novella from Steiner (The Catastrophe, 1996, etc.).
They’ve been married 20 years, this nameless couple. We don’t know much about them. She’s a globe-trotting artist with a flourishing career. He has an unchallenging desk job. They’re sitting on the terrace of their home in the South of France, overlooking an olive grove. She has confessed to an affair with a lover in Paris and will be leaving her husband. Their marriage had become claustrophobic, she claims. They are no longer compatible. Her new love is “a mad love, perhaps doomed, but beautiful.” She does not elaborate. The focus is on the husband, the narrator. This is a very French work by an American. Steiner has incorporated some elements of the nouveau roman. Plot and character are out. In their place is a reality shaped by the artful deployment of key words, phrases and objects. A key recurring phrase is “the ordeal of the postmortem.” Taken together with a key word, “nonexistence,” the meaning is clear. The death of his marriage will entail the death of his spirit. He will be forced to conduct an autopsy on himself. Rather than make these points to his wife, he makes them to himself in a monologue, since she has stepped away to pack her suitcases. The cerebral is interrupted by the carnal when he recalls their sex life. Their first kiss led to sex in an elevator operated by a handicapped man. She would often arouse him in public places by going nude underneath her Burberry; “nude” is another key word. Yet the overall effect is more clinical than erotic. There’s a surprise ending, but it does not offer a way out of the maze that Steiner has constructed.
A tedious investigation of a dying marriage that lacks the elegance associated with the genre.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58243-642-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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