Brebel writes well, and the stories are elegantly translated, but there’s only one gear on his voiture, and his writing...
The paradox embedded in the title captures the existential mood of these 13 stories, in which characters remain largely anonymous and situations full of angst.
French novelist Brebel’s (Francis Bacon's Armchair, 2016, etc.) book comes in at just about 100 pages, so each story unfolds quickly—though “story” in a formal sense is perhaps a misnomer. Brebel is instead a chronicler of pain and meaninglessness. In “Off-Season,” for example, almost every sentence begins with the word “She,” and the life of this unnamed woman is presented in simple, declarative sentences: “She subsists solely on cereal and canned food and consumes large amounts of instant coffee. She limits her electricity usage to the necessary minimum and brushes her teeth at least three times a day.” When a man enters her room, she fantasizes about his intentions, but they exchange no words and she subsides into the mundanity of her existence. In “Intimacy,” a man “reads” a photograph of his former girlfriend and tries to conjure up the circumstances under which it was taken. Because the photo shows her in a bathtub, he projects himself into the sensuality of the image as well as into the hypothetical lasciviousness of the photographer. Ultimately, of course, she remains an image and an object, separated from the narrator’s life. “Infiltration” focuses on a woman who once again experiences the tension between fantasy and the quotidian. At one point a man gives her his hotel room key, and she enters the room when she knows he’s not there. She searches the room and dreamily fantasizes about what she might mean to him, concluding that “they would make...a mismatched and pathetic couple, their life together obsessively regimented by the whim of her emotions while he devotedly obeyed her smallest requests.”
Brebel writes well, and the stories are elegantly translated, but there’s only one gear on his voiture, and his writing scarcely discloses a shred of humor.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943150-28-1
Page Count: 101
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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