A sad, touching tale of friendship and a smart, subtle dialogue on just where a culture’s stories come from.
Whiting winner Nunez (A Feather on the Breath of God, 1995, etc.) spins a moving tale about the unlikely friendship between a recently successful young writer and the old neighbor who seeks her.
On the publication of her first book, the unnamed narrator begins to receive letters from friends and old fans. Some are well-wishers she once knew, while others want advice or assistance in becoming writers themselves. Rouenna is both, a woman who grew up in the same Staten Island project, but whose life took a dramatically different turn when she became a nurse and went to Vietnam. At first, Rouenna asks for help in writing her life story. The narrator instinctively refuses, but a relationship nevertheless ensues. Only when Rouenna commits suicide, however, does the narrator—recently preoccupied by a failed romance of her own that sent her running to New England to teach, with periodic visits to Rouenna down south—begin to reflect on the meaning of their friendship. Pleasing though the story of this friendship is, the subtext of Rouenna’s many harrowing tales of Vietnam is more interesting, most of the language and tension in these sections coming from the vast amount of Vietnam literature that the narrator admits to having studied. Vietnam, it seems, is America’s repository of trauma. The narrator worries that the real event may be buried under its many literary uses, but this reservation does not prevent her from pressing it into service as well. Rouenna is real, but she is also the narrator’s sharer; Rouenna’s possible post-traumatic stress disorder is kin to the chrysalis that the narrator crawls into when her romance falls apart. Rouenna’s death allows the narrator to transform her completely into a character who is at once another person and a mirror image of her own haunted self.
A sad, touching tale of friendship and a smart, subtle dialogue on just where a culture’s stories come from.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-25430-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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