A monochromatic sketch of emotional disconnect.
Five Japanese quarter-lifers disclose secrets and glimpses of their dark sides in a chilly slice of vérité from Yoshida (Villain, 2010).
An assailant is roving the streets near the Tokyo apartment at the center of this novel, Yoshida’s second translated into English. But the residents have other things on their minds. Ryosuke is a college student trying to work up the nerve to make a move on a friend’s girlfriend. Kotomi is having an on-again, off-again relationship with a young actor who’s suddenly become a star. Mirai is a hard-drinking woman who’s spliced together a tape of rape scenes from various movies, a horrid inversion of the cheery climax of Cinema Paradiso. Satoru is a prostitute with a penchant for breaking into homes, and Naoki is a film buff whose concluding revelation clarifies much of the preceding story. Yoshida is cannily aware of the ways that people in their late teens and 20s play-act at personalities, taking on ideas and tossing them aside. (And, being originally published in 2002, the novel is a reminder that such narcissism isn’t a function of social media.) The downside of writing about such personalities in process, though, is that emotional footholds are hard for the reader to locate; Parade dedicates a section to each of the five players, but each has a quotidian flatness. The most intriguing of the group is Mirai, who’s the savviest about calling out the white lies and bragging of her roommates, but she’s oblivious to the reasons behind her own alcoholic self-annihilation. “The only way I can be a true humanitarian in Japan today is to be snide and disagreeable,” she says. Why so snide and disagreeable? Yoshida might argue that providing a pat answer would undercut the mood of alienation. But as it is, the book is dour and distant.
A monochromatic sketch of emotional disconnect.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-45493-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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