An ambitious avant-garde experiment that might be generously read as homage.
A professor who studies the history of prison architecture stumbles into a peculiar misadventure while visiting a paramour in Buenos Aires.
In what might just be the strangest transmogrification of a writer in recent memory, Munson (The War Against the Assholes, 2015, etc.) completely abandons the adolescent angst of his first two novels to enter the surreal literary landscape of South America occupied so fully by writers like César Aira and the late Roberto Bolaño. This poetic, Byzantine short novel depicts the travels and increasingly unreliable account of professor Boris Leonidovich, who is invited by his professional colleague and occasional lover, Ana Mariategui, to speak at a conference at the University of Buenos Aires. As he meets new people, the professor identifies himself as “Boris Pasternak,” though, he notes, “No relation to the poet, novelist, and correspondent with Rilke.” What follows evolves into a phantasmagoric nightmare as Leonidovich wanders into a seedy barrio filled with stray dogs and a spooky graveyard. Back at the university, he finds students divided into camps, half wearing dog tags and broadcasting a hypnotic chorus the professor dubs “Dog Symphony” while protestors proclaim, “Ethics first, then meat.” When Ana disappears, Leonidovich seeks out Sanchis Mira, the conference organizer and head of the mysterious Department of Social Praxis, before encountering profound violence in the streets of Buenos Aires at the hands of an underground insurgency. Soon, this already outlandish narrative becomes as unhinged as its narrator as it hurtles toward an ambiguous, Kafka-esque denouement. Fans of Aira will find a curiously analogous style at work here, though whether it captures the Argentine writer’s humorous spark is questionable. For Munson, it’s a departure so abrupt that one wonders what inspired such a finely curated, grotesquely styled take on Argentine modernism.
An ambitious avant-garde experiment that might be generously read as homage.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2768-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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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