Wildly unimaginative and just generally gross.
Misandry replaces misogyny in this pseudo-feminist revenge fantasy.
Jonathon Bridge was born into money, and his success as an executive has only increased his wealth and power. Cocaine binges and sexual harassment are, as far as he is concerned, perks of privilege. His one saving grace is his wife, a free spirit and dedicated journalist. When Adalia learns what her husband has been getting up to at the office, she offers him one chance to win her back: He can spend a year as a supplicant in The Fortress, a colony ruled by a society of women called the Vaik. It is her hope that this experience will cure him of his narcissism. “You need to learn insignificance, Jonathon.” The best science-fiction authors invent new worlds to use as laboratories in which to interrogate real-world problems, either to test out solutions or issue a warning. Jones (Isabelle of the Moon and Stars, 2014, etc.) does not do this. What she does instead is create a fictional universe in which it’s acceptable to delight in the degradation of men. What’s in store for Jonathon becomes clear as soon as he enters The Fortress, when he is stripped and subjected to a body-cavity search. His clothes are replaced with a form-fitting tunic that barely covers his genitals. Over the course of a few hundred pages, Jonathon will endure forced labor and sexual servitude. He will be compelled to have sex with a child. He will be penetrated by a man without his consent. The Vaik, inscrutable and lascivious, are cartoon women crafted from tired patriarchal tropes. The sex scenes—of which there are several—range from ludicrously appalling to bizarrely gruesome. The alien trappings—the strange ways of the Vaik, the imaginary plants and animals—are gewgaws, apparently intended to distract the reader from the fact that this is, in essence, nothing more than sadomasochistic porn.
Wildly unimaginative and just generally gross.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64566-002-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Erewhon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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