Petri’s moody hand works some dark magic in these pages, but the story more often becomes unintentionally hilarious, thanks...
An island overtakes its small and dwindling human population in significance and interest.
There’s nothing like a remote island to get a novelist’s creative juices flowing. This is especially true when the island is remote and desolate and those living on it are possessed of numerous traditions and tics that are in danger of disappearing under the onslaught of a foreign culture. In the case of The Flying Island, that island is a lonely rock in the Azores named Pico, and the novelist’s stand-in is an unnamed Italian woman who comes there to stay in a rented house by the sea. A tourist who would never think of herself as a tourist, she communes with the locals and becomes immersed in their lives, such as they are. Her main companion is the elderly and garrulous Joao Freitas. Like seemingly most everyone else in the islands, Joao went off to find his fortune—or at least some work—in America and seems to have given up his soul in the process, substituting it with rampant consumerism and alcohol. The pensive narrator comes across other types as well, the earth-motherly Maria Silva and the Lima sisters, Isabel and Maria Jose. As should be obvious, little happens in this fey little volume. Petri seemingly wanted to write a haunted story about a windswept island slowly being lost to history and cross it with some comical anti-Americanism. Whenever the occasional US tourists appear, they are loud and grotesquely fat. Even the Lima sister who married an American, as opposed to a Mexican man as her sister did, is shown as stupid and cow-like.
Petri’s moody hand works some dark magic in these pages, but the story more often becomes unintentionally hilarious, thanks to its bourgeois pretensions.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-902881-64-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
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