Two people are stuck together on a train in a despondent land.
Liksom’s (Dark Paradise, 2006, etc.) book comes with a strong pedigree—a Finlandia Prize and an English PEN translation award. Set during the Soviet-Afghan war, this dark, cheerless, meditative short novel focuses on two characters: an unnamed female college student from Finland who’s studying in Moscow and Vadim Nikolayevich Ivanov, a slovenly, brutish, foulmouthed former soldier who now works construction. They share a cramped compartment on the train to Mongolia’s capital, Ulan Bator. She’s fulfilling a wish she and her boyfriend, Mitka, once had. He’s now in a mental institution; she’s trying to come to grips with his illness. To pass the time she reads Vsevolod Garshin’s The Scarlet Flower, about a man in an insane asylum. The “girl,” as she’s named, never speaks. Vadim spews forth racial insults and talks incessantly about sex, Russia, and his rotten wife (at the train station the girl caught a glimpse of her swollen face). He also tells her, “Don’t believe everything I feed you.” They play draughts and share food; he gets drunk. Told from her perspective, it’s a highly detailed travelogue, with occasional flashbacks to her past. The train moves, stops, moves, breaks down, moves again, while Russian classical music plays from small speakers. She’s always gazing out the window through “gritty sleet, mud and snow” at the cold, bleak, harsh taiga. One of the book’s strengths is the many highly detailed, poetic descriptions of the mountains, snow-covered plains, and isolated, poverty-stricken towns with squalid and derelict buildings. Occasionally, the two of them venture out to explore, search for scarce food. Eventually, they manage to fashion an odd, quixotic relationship. This relentless tale of “light and shadow,” with its “joys, sorrows, hope, hopelessness, hate and, perhaps, love,” taxes and batters us until we finally acquiesce.
An unsettling, politically charged parable about the proletariat’s Soviet Union on the eve of dissolution.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55597-747-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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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
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth/Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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