An assemblage of both gauzy and substantial stories from an unquestionably imaginative author.
A dark and dreamy collection by Schweblin (Fever Dream, 2017), like an eerie walk through a perpetual twilight of uneasy—and often absurdly funny—states of consciousness and being.
In these 20 swiftly running stories, unimpeachably translated from Spanish by McDowell, Schweblin explores the slippery terrain of the mind's deeper recesses, where anxieties over the limits, or lack thereof, of the possible multiply and mutate. The collection’s trenchant first story, “Headlights,” begins with a bride realizing she’s been abandoned on the side of a highway by her new husband after stopping for a bathroom break, ostensibly because she took too long and “waiting wears [men] out.” Here she encounters a field full of jilted, wailing, and vengeful fellow brides in a witty examination of gender allegiances and competition, and dependency and tolerance in romantic relationships. “Preserves” introduces a pregnant woman and her husband who are both unprepared for the rigors of parenthood; they take drastic measures to eliminate the pregnancy but somehow preserve their would-be daughter for when they're ready. In the title story, the limitlessness and obligations of parental love are put to the test by a teenage daughter's curious appetites. And in "Toward a Happy Civilization," in a clever dilation of the idea of never being content where one is, an office worker from the capital plots his escape from the countryside, where he's being held captive by a train station attendant and his wife, who cooks wholesome meals and assigns daily tasks of vigorous outdoor labor to the man and their other office-worker detainees. Though some stories are more desultory than others and may not entirely satisfy, at her best, Schweblin builds dense and uncanny worlds, probing the psychology of human relationships and the ways we perceive existence and interpret culture, with dark humor and sharp teeth.
An assemblage of both gauzy and substantial stories from an unquestionably imaginative author.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18462-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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