Happily the novel’s infectious exuberance compensates for the overwrought prose.
A rambunctious second novel from the award-winning Shanghvi (The Last Song of Dusk, 2004), in which the spectacle of Bombay serves as backdrop for a dizzying plot involving murder, adultery, AIDS, police corruption, bribery, celebrity and the lonely pursuit of high art.
The story takes place in 1990s Bombay, where flamingoes occupy a city wasteland. Karan Seth is new to the city, a newspaper photographer with a promising future. His life is forever altered when he is asked to photograph the reclusive pianist Samar Arora; during the shoot, Samar’s best friend Zaira, a Bollywood superstar, shows up. Karan is brought into their rarefied world of cocktails and art-chat, becomes a confidant of Zaira (though there is no attraction as she is in love with Samar, who is gay, and lives with American writer Leo) and is encouraged to pursue his grand project, a photographic portrait of Bombay. While at a bazaar, Karan meets Rhea Dalal, an enigmatic ceramicist who first leads him to the photo-worthy sights of Bombay, and then to her penthouse bedroom. Karan and Rhea’s relationship is complicated by the fact that she is passionately in love with her husband. In the midst of the melodrama, tragedy strikes—Zaira is killed by a man who has been stalking her for years. What follows is a portrait of corruption as it becomes likely that the murderer, the son of a high-ranking politician, will be set free. Meanwhile, Leo contracts AIDS and returns to San Francisco with Samar; Rhea becomes pregnant and breaks off the affair; and Karan gives up photography and moves to London. But the story’s not done until the living principals return to Bombay, ravaged by tragedy and prepared to accept their fate. All this would be quite a ride if it were not so often weighted with verbosity: “The timeless splendor surrounding them resounded with wisdom and betrayal, and they were compelled to speak in whispers, for the landscape discouraged sound, supplying a stillness that held them both like a flag in a fist.”
Happily the novel’s infectious exuberance compensates for the overwrought prose.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-59349-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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
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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