Parekh writes prose that sometimes is self-consciously portentous, but, still, he has created an intelligent and moving take...
A promising first novel about the Indian immigration experience deftly avoids the predictable overemphasis on food and culture, and explores instead the universal theme of failed dreams.
Moving between the past and present, the narrator, Rajiv Kothari, like all good storytellers, takes his time to tell how he came to steal the Ambassador—a popular Indian car, not a diplomat. Prompted by the sudden death of his father Vasant from a heart attack, he begins with the past as he tries to understand his father, whose life in America had never matched his extravagant expectations. The narrative is also an exploration of Rajiv’s own feeling about the tensions between his Indian heritage and his American experience. Rajiv recalls how his grandfather Bapuji, a fervent Nationalist in the 1930s, when India was still under British rule, bombed a local bridge; while Bapuji escaped, his wife was briefly imprisoned as an accessory. Their son Vasant came to the US in the mid-’60s as a graduate student in engineering. He stayed on, returning only to marry an Indian woman, with whom he raised a family in suburban New York. As the years passed, Vasant made a good living, but, as Rajiv recalls, the cumulative wounds of alienation and prejudice took their toll: neighbors objected to the presence of visiting family members; and the parents of Rajiv’s girlfriend Anne were embarrassed by Vasant’s behavior. Taking a semester off, Rajiv goes to India, where he finds his grandparents living in reduced circumstances, while Bapuji is still an activist, even though his dream of an India free of foreign influence is tarnished by reality. After Rajiv is inveigled into helping Bapuji plan another bombing, he begins to understand how misleading snap judgments can be: “people fracture into possibility.”
Parekh writes prose that sometimes is self-consciously portentous, but, still, he has created an intelligent and moving take on a timely subject.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1429-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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