This is a significant addition to South American literature in translation; the breadth of Gallardo's imagination expands...
Rediscovered Argentinian Gallardo's (1931-1988) short story collection pushes the form in new and unexpected directions in her first book translated into English.
Like the work of her more famous contemporary Jorge Luis Borges, Gallardo's writing eschews realism. In "Phases of the Moon," a missionary dies while attempting to baptize a werewolf. In "Things Happen," a pensioner proud of his garden wakes up to find himself, along with his house and yard, "in the middle of the sea." In another story, clouds are revealed to be controlling human affairs: "It's clouds themselves, not the mere factors that form them, that act on the collective events of humanity. They combine them, decide them, precipitate them." Playful and philosophical, many of Gallardo's stories are written in the style of fables. In "The Thirty-Three Wives of Emperor Blue Stone," each brief section is narrated by one of the titular women, not all of whom are fond of their husband: "May he die, defeated....May his sons betray him, and he know it." The story ends with a flash-forward to the emperor's funeral, where "his wives will stand in a row, waiting for their skulls to be broken." Gallardo has a strong, original, unsentimental style—an island with birds flying above it "seemed to move, like a dead rat covered in flies." Stories begin matter-of-factly: "A man spent twenty years making himself a pair of wings," or "A cat escaped from a house full of ornaments," or "I prefer to slit throats, though my marksmanship isn't bad." Moving between fantasy and myth, they explore the points of view of animals real and imagined ("Tall as a hundred trains, the sea serpent lifted her body into the air, and enjoyed the view of infinite sea"), of trains, a lawn, two Danish siblings, artists and prostitutes, a loner at a bar whose "loneliness waited for him just as a car might for others."
This is a significant addition to South American literature in translation; the breadth of Gallardo's imagination expands the canon.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78227-403-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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