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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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