A shuffling, to some degree, of all the same cards makes for a certain repetitiveness. But Jhabvala still outwrites many an...
Jhabvala (Shards of Memory, 1995, etc.) describes a life she could have lived but didn’t.
Backgrounded by the question What if?, each of the nine chapters here is a variant on Jhabvala’s actual life. The women who narrate were born in Germany to Jewish families, as Jhabvala was; before WWII, they immigrated to Britain, as she did, or to the US, and, like her, they share a preoccupation with India. Some chapters are more memorable than others. In the first and most accomplished, the narrator, now old and living on a reduced income, returns to India, where she can live more cheaply. She’d lived there as a young woman working on her dissertation, but her demanding family summoned her back to New York to care for them. In India again, she is comforted by the presence of many old women like herself, who have spent “ lives of unrequited longing.” In one chapter with a New York setting, the narrator has an affair with a refugee pianist whom her mother idolizes; in another, when an old Indian lover, though ailing and wanted by the police, comes to stay, the narrator ruefully observes that he’s still attractive to younger women. Money is a problem as properties must be sold and rooms let to fellow émigrés. A narrator often falls in love with a charismatic man with spiritual interests, whom she follows to, or meets up with in, India. Relationships never work out, and the narrators are observers of others’ happiness as their own eludes them. India, too, though revered, is often equally disappointing. None of these alternate lives is enviable, though each is interesting, peopled with such characters as a famous émigré artist down on his luck who sketches a narrator in her youth; and a notable Indian guru in whose mountain home another finds temporary fulfillment.
A shuffling, to some degree, of all the same cards makes for a certain repetitiveness. But Jhabvala still outwrites many an author.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-59376-028-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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
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