A richly textured, often poetic story of one East Indian woman’s tumultuous personal fortunes as they develop against the backdrop of India’s independence. Growing up without a mother in a world in which myths are the only luxury, Roop, an ambivalent Sikh, dreams of escape. Her prayers seem answered when the Sikh Sardarji, a wealthy, Oxford-educated engineer working for the British, asks for her hand in marriage. Sardarji’s childless marriage to Satya has prompted him to seek a fertile second wife. But Satya, a sophisticated, well-mannered woman who resents the English intrusion on her homeland, is anguished by this attractive peasant rival from the village who has stolen Sardarji’s attentions. Long-suffering Satya is the spiritual core of India; Sardarji, clever, argumentative, and self-possessed, betrays her in an echo of his equivocations between his people and his admired superiors. Roop bears first a daughter, Pavan, who is given to Satya as an expendable misfortune, and then a son, Timcu. When Timcu is sent to Satya as well, Roop can take no more, and insists that Satya be exiled from the household. Her heart broken, Satya dies in 1943, as India is seething with tension between Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh factions. Ghandi rises to power, and the British yield India. Though the partition of Pakistan fuels talk of a —Sikhistan,— there is no homeland for Sikhs, and so Roop and Sardarji embark on an agonizing 100-page odyssey to Delhi and safety. Upon returning to her childhood home, Roop finds desolation and death—and the place from which she once ached to flee now lost to her. Newcomer Baldwin’s theme—the grueling uses to which women’s bodies and spirits are put, and their abuses at the hands of men—combines with the political analogue of India’s struggle for independence to produce a plush, sensuous drama. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-49604-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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