A feast for mind and heart.
Second-novelist Ozeki (My Year of Meats, 1998) shifts her focus to potatoes in this full-course meal of a story about family farmers, environmental activists, and corporate agribusinessmen whose interests collide on a farm in Liberty Falls, Idaho.
Retired potato farmer and semi-invalid Lloyd Fuller and his Japanese wife Momo, who suffers from advancing Alzheimer’s, have sold most of their acreage to their daughter Yumi’s childhood friend Cass and her husband, but they still run a small catalogue seed company out of Momo’s garden. No one has seen Yumi since she ran away at 14 after Lloyd found out about her “affair” with history teacher Elliot Rhodes, but when Lloyd suffers a heart attack, Cass tracks her down. Yumi, now a part-time college teacher and real-estate developer in Hawaii, arrives at the farm with her three children (from three fathers) so full of unresolved angst that she barely registers the emotional crisis quietly brewing within Cass over her childlessness and a recent bout of cancer. Soon the Seeds of Resistance, a troop of eco-activists, show up and proclaim Lloyd, whose Christian fundamentalist beliefs about life’s sacred nature mesh with their own New Age-y ones, their new guru. Yumi finds herself the outsider as the Seeds care for her ailing father, charm her kids, and help Momo catalogue her seeds before memory fades completely. Meanwhile, Elliot, now a p.r. flack for an agribusiness, is sent to Idaho to push one of its products that the Seeds happen to be protesting. Yumi and Elliot reconnect, though this time it’s Elliot who is smitten. Lloyd’s health deteriorates, the Seeds plan a major action, and Elliot’s agribusiness operatives run amok. Liberty Falls becomes the intersection of intense personal drama—romantic and familial—and intense eco-political (both economic and ecological) theatrics. Add a thorough history of American potato farming and a huge cast of characters, most fully realized and heart-wrenching in their imperfect yearnings.
A feast for mind and heart.Pub Date: March 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03091-0
Page Count: 417
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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