Allusive and metaphorical, with a nicely unpredictable close that offers a flicker of hope for humankind.
Guatemalan exile Rey Rosa (Dust on Her Tongue, 1992) borrows elements from his own life in a short novel of futuristic alienation.
On leaving his homeland, Rey Rosa immigrated to the U.S. but then departed for Morocco, where he came into the orbit of Paul Bowles, his first translator. Bowles turns up in this novel as John Field, “the American artist and critic who’d spent the last half of his life in Tangier.” Field has befriended many people in his time, among them a Mexican writer who, many years after Field’s death, is enlisted by old friend Mohammed Zhrouni to help him tell a story he has recorded on the now ancient medium of the cassette—but also to decipher the contents of a memory card. Tapes and card help provide a circumstantial portrait of Field and Mohammed but more of Mohammed’s young son, Abdelkrim, a genius who—a crow tells Mohammed, for this is, after all, a fable—“has a special…destiny in store for him.” Mohammed wonders if the crow said “spatial” instead of “special,” and there’s a reason for that. Abdelkrim, for his part, fulfills both prophecies, though in a way that is perhaps not very realistic—as noted, this is a fable, so that’s to be forgiven—and that also pointedly criticizes the way in which Muslims are perceived in post–9/11 America. “Time does not exist,” Rey Rosa repeatedly says, but yet it passes: Abdelkrim’s dream to become an American and, more than that, an American astronaut is thwarted, but he manages to find his way into space anyway even as Field enters eternity “a week before the Americans brought down Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.” Rey Rosa’s story tackles questions of religion, anomie, and, ultimately, what the authorities would deem terrorism: Asked whether he has become an anarchist, Abdelkrim answers, “Antiarms more than anything else,” for which he has just the remedy.
Allusive and metaphorical, with a nicely unpredictable close that offers a flicker of hope for humankind.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-9035-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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