A welcome exercise in literary archaeology, especially for students of modernism and 20th-century literature.
A long-forgotten addendum to More Pricks Than Kicks, restored 81 years after Beckett (The Complete Short Prose, 1996, etc.) wrote this strange, allusive tale.
As Mark Nixon (Univ. of Reading) notes in his introduction, when Chatto & Windus took on More Pricks—a slim book of interrelated stories about a goofball named Belacqua—its editor suggested that an 11th story be added to it, if for no other reason than to bulk it out. He almost certainly didn’t reckon on what Beckett delivered, a Joyce-lite reimagination of Dante’s descent that was full of subtle shaggy dog–isms, with plenty of sexual suggestion: “Can you think of any thing existing, God or Gonococcus, lower than the creature, his three score years and ten of hot cockles?” One sympathizes with Chatto’s decision to pass, though one also wonders if John Lennon somehow got hold of the manuscript before penning A Spaniard in the Works; especially the very last page, with its resonant line, “[s]o the submarine departed, very cross indeed.” Beckett’s sardonic surrealism, so Anna Livia Plurabelle–istic, is on full display here, and whatever its effects on the publisher, it’s clear he was having a good time setting his nightmarish scenario in motion, having killed off its main character earlier and now being forced to come up with some plausible reason to place him once again “up and about in the dust of the world.” But never mind plausibility: Read this as an extended prose poem, an exercise in beautiful language and striking image (“Belacqua, crazed with compassion, rolling about in a maffick of grief in his cauldron or basket, felt it incumbent upon him to hazard a kind word”), and this short text finds its rightful place among Beckett’s novels, plays and poems.
A welcome exercise in literary archaeology, especially for students of modernism and 20th-century literature.Pub Date: July 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-9407-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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