A welcome debut collection. One hopes for more—and that Demirtaş will not be silenced by his captors.
Imprisoned Kurdish lawyer and progressive politician Demirtaş delivers a closely observed series of portraits of lives oppressed.
Demirtaş, held in a high-security prison in Turkey, describes his surroundings as a kind of city of intellectuals who ought to be out serving their country—but there’s the rub, for that country, in his case, is not the one that holds him captive but the independent Kurdistan of his hopes. In his introduction, he argues that literature and politics serve the same purpose for the audience, namely, to inspire. Whether readers will in fact be inspired by his grimly matter-of-fact stories is an open question, but certainly they convey the essential terror of living in a system under which violence is a given and families are often separated: A young housecleaner is swept up in a demonstration and beaten and jailed; a prodigal daughter reads in a dying father’s notebook that “every stone on the path to loneliness has been laid by nobody else but you”; a young man, shot in the head, contemplates his passing: “My grave rests in Semra’s bloodshot eyes, hers beneath a tree in the village.” Naturally, some of Demirtaş’ stories are set in prison, where he notes the apparent paradox that though the courtyard is tiny, it is infinite, open to the endless circling of its trudging inhabitants, not just the human ones, but the “ants and the spiders with which we share it.” And in one ironic piece addressed to a letter-reading committee of prison censors, he darts from memory to memory, evoking his father’s way of making a poetry of foul curses and a childhood friend’s return in a dream to remind him of the smell of pastirma, “that spicy meat that comes in thin slices”—the stuff, in other words, of the stories he feels compelled to write from behind the walls.
A welcome debut collection. One hopes for more—and that Demirtaş will not be silenced by his captors.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-57693-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: SJP for Hogarth
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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