A lively tale of magical realism that occasionally stumbles in attempting to wow you, offering a rather superficial analysis...
Birth, death, three husbands, eight children, and a few grumpy ghosts are just some of the details in the grand life of Rosa, courtesy of Israeli novelist Horn (Four Mothers, 1999, etc.).
Rosa is born during Israel’s War of Independence, and her fantastical life begins shortly after the murder of her father. Raised by the thin, dour Angela, who makes a tidy living by reading her neighbors’ coffee grounds, young Rosa first finds fame as the most beautiful baby born to the new state. Salons rename a hairstyle for her perfect blond ringlets; strangers on the street stare at her loveliness. She lives a charmed life, though not untouched by the tragedies of the greater world: her best childhood friend is a Holocaust survivor (she learns arithmetic from the numbers tattooed on his arm), and she’s haunted by the little Arab girl whose usurped house she now lives in. At 14, she marries her uncle Joseph, and, despite the unusual union, they share a happy life and raise seven children. When their eighth is born, Rosa is in her 50s, and she makes headlines again, but her daughter Angel is hunchbacked and will never grow in size past the age of two, fulfilling Rosa’s secret wish that her children stay small forever. In accordance with a childhood game that predicted Rosa would have four husbands, Joseph falls into a decline and soon dies after seeing the deformed Angel. Husband number two, a childhood sweetheart, dies in a bizarre accident involving Rosa’s again-newsworthy weight gain; husband three is an artist seeking to paint the country’s most famous woman. Rosa’s zest for life, food, and sex ease the anguish of her husbands’ deaths (their ghosts are in bed with her at night), but it’s Angel, perhaps a demon of bad luck, who challenges Rosa’s will to live.
A lively tale of magical realism that occasionally stumbles in attempting to wow you, offering a rather superficial analysis of its hero. Still, an entertaining folly.Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26590-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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