An ambitious novel with a distinct narrator and fresh voice.
A quirky war veteran goes on a pilgrimage to meet his hero, the author Gabriel García Márquez, in this poetic debut novel.
Jefferson Long Solider has returned home after two tours in Iraq. The young veteran steps off a plane in Albuquerque, N.M., and begins to chant, “I am Jefferson Long Soldier, and I am returned from WA-AR.” It’s the first of many chanting scenes in a journey steeped in elements of magical realism, echoing Jefferson’s obsession with García Márquez’s 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. He carries the book with him wherever he goes, refers to its author as “GGM” and is certain that it has saved his life. His grandmother Esco and his cousin Nigel welcome him home and anxiously wait to see how the war has changed him. While in Iraq, Jefferson began to record each death he witnessed, and the list begins to haunt him; what should be a triumphant return from war becomes a painful, restless ordeal. Jefferson finds Dr. Monika, an unorthodox “pseudo-doctor” who allows him to chant and talk about his transformative belief in García Márquez’s novel, after which he finds his next step is clear: He must ride Nigel’s motorcycle to Mexico City and see the author in person. Stark presents a largely interior journey, with long passages describing the landscape (“Jefferson could think of nothing in the world he wanted to do as he gazed at the snow-tipped mountains way off in the distance”) and ruminating on García Márquez’s work, although the best storytelling occurs during scenes of action. Jefferson’s adventures are often dreamlike, and some may actually be dreams: At one point, he’s captured by bandits and nearly executed; at others, he’s fed and loved by beautiful twin women and helps a mother deliver a baby in a forest. As the lines blur between Jefferson’s physical journey and his spiritual quest, he eventually finds a purpose for all his stories. The novel’s textual dialogue with One Hundred Years of Solitude is significant, and it’s an ambitious conceit. However, readers who aren’t familiar with that masterpiece may get mired in the details, as Jefferson’s own life story sometimes gets lost. Still, the story’s happy ending is richly deserved.
An ambitious novel with a distinct narrator and fresh voice.Pub Date: April 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0991410507
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Leaf Storm Press
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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