Fine work from a gifted writer who has important subject matter to explore.
British-Palestinian writer Dabbagh’s debut examines her people’s tragic past and conflicted present through the prism of one family’s experiences.
The Mujaheds are the sort of intellectual, nonreligious Palestinians who once formed the expatriate backbone of the struggle to reclaim their homeland, but who are rapidly being marginalized in Gaza. Indeed, Jibril, the father, has abandoned the Palestinian Liberation Organisation—and his wife and kids—for the consumerist narcolepsy of a Gulf state. Rashid, like his father, just wants to get out of Gaza and is thrilled in the opening pages to get a scholarship that will enable him to return to London and his English girlfriend Lisa. His twin sister Iman is frustrated by the Women’s Committee she’s joined, whose members disdain her as an outsider who’s only recently returned to Gaza. The only people who seem to share her thirst for meaningful action are the Islamic fundamentalists who gain credibility each time the Israeli army bombs civilian sites or bulldozes Palestinian homes. Their mother, once the most militant of all, is reduced to clipping newspaper articles and answering questions for a history of the movement being written by eldest son Sabri, who lost both his legs, his wife and his infant son in a car bombing facilitated by a Palestinian informer. Dabbagh unsparingly shows a people divided and demoralized by six decades of exile and powerlessness, and her novel quietly but acidly indicts Western ignorance of and indifference to the Palestinians’ plight. Yet, the book is also a finely wrought tale of family and coming-of-age that fulfills the mandates of any serious work of fiction: Dabbagh creates characters we care about, puts their equally valid but conflicting agendas into play and engineers an ending that brings individual satisfactions and some closure without ever suggesting that the larger dilemmas have been resolved.
Fine work from a gifted writer who has important subject matter to explore.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-876-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
