Sometimes marred by a monotony in its characterizations, but, overall, a gentle tale with appealingly flawed people and an...
Third in a multigenerational saga (A Parchment of Leaves, 2002, etc.) of a Kentucky mountain family with tragedy to burn.
Easter and her younger sister Anneth are orphaned when their father dies in a cave-in at the Altamont Mine and their mother hangs herself shortly thereafter.The two and their brother Gabe are raised by their grandmothers: Serena, whose family settled in the shadow of the mountain at Free Creek; and Vine, a Cherokee whose land was on the other side of the mountain in an area that’s now a mine. Easter is a churchgoing Pentecostal who finds love with El, but grief when her only child is stillborn and she can’t have another. (The child has a blue birthmark similar to a “coal tattoo” that marks men who have survived cave-ins.) Anneth is a beauty whose wild streak draws her into drinking, barroom flirtations, and impulsive marriages to a Nashville-bound singer/guitarist, a wealthy mine foreman, and ultimately a dangerously controlling man. The relationship between the sisters is frayed by Anneth’s recklessness, but ultimately family ties endure when the Altamont mining company turns to strip mining, using coerced “broad form deeds,” and tries to bulldoze their mountain (“ . . . loving the land was a given, not something one could choose. . .”). When the sisters and their aunt stand in front of the bulldozers, the media plays up the incident, and the land is saved for now. Anneth falls in love with a draftee headed to Vietnam, discovers she’s pregnant, and promises to give the baby to Easter and El to raise. Both sisters are natural singers, and a motif about the coming of rock ’n’ roll in the 1960s adds an intriguing period dimension.
Sometimes marred by a monotony in its characterizations, but, overall, a gentle tale with appealingly flawed people and an exquisite sense of the quotidian.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-56512-368-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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
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
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