A tribute to the book-obsessed that’s unfortunately cast with stereotypes.
A triangle of unrequited love and a tussle over an apocryphal Melville manuscript enliven Hay’s bildungsroman.
Eighteen-year-old Rosemary, father unknown, journeys from Tasmania to New York City after her mother’s hat business fails, followed soon by her death. Rosemary lands a job at the Arcade, a musty warren of used books, patterned after the Strand bookstore and staffed by bookish boors: skinflint owner Pike; the big lugs who wrangle the paperback tables; beautiful, asexual Oscar, on whom Rosemary nurses a crush; myopic albino Geist, who prices review copies for resale; and Mitchell, who beguiles well-heeled clients in his rare-books room. After Geist, besotted with Rosemary, floats her a loan, she sublets a cold apartment in a bad neighborhood and gamely dresses it with gimcracks and keepsakes, including a box containing her mother’s ashes. There she entertains gal-pals Lillian, from Argentina, whose son was among the “disappeared,” and Pearl, a pre-op transsexual who works the register at the Arcade. Geist asks Rosemary to read him an anonymous letter offering for sale a contraband Melville manuscript. Rumors of the letter, obviously intercepted before it reached Pike, fall from Rosemary’s loose lips, kindling suspicion and booklust in Mitchell and Oscar, who compulsively researches obscure facts. In two pokey chapters, Rosemary and Oscar peruse Melvilleanea, including the “Agatha Letters” to Hawthorne (large chunks of which are excerpted verbatim), detailing Melville’s idea for a novel about a wife abandoned by her sailor husband. Once the two deduce that Geist’s quarry could be that same book (The Isle of the Cross, rejected by Melville’s publishers, no known copy in existence), the story picks up speed. Geist’s plot to fence the manuscript is exposed too late to redeem him or Oscar, but Rosemary, leaving bookselling behind for publishing, has amassed invaluable life experience, not to mention avuncular advice from her colorful older mentors, most of whom she cheerfully—and thankfully—ignores.
A tribute to the book-obsessed that’s unfortunately cast with stereotypes.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-385-51848-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
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