More Clochemerle than The Leopard, Hornby’s debut deals in types, cliché, and picturesque charm.
A morality tale unravels the mystery of an unlikely peasant girl and her Sicilian community.
Who was Mennulara, the spinster-maid of the Alfallipe family, who ran its finances and gave shelter to its widow after Judge Alfallipe died? Now that Mennulara herself is dead, tongues are wagging in the hill town of Roccacolomba. Was she a fine person or a servant-mistress with airs above her station? And why did the local mafia capo attend her funeral? Over the ensuing thirty days, every class, from priest to postal worker, will have something to contribute, in the way of reminiscence, observation, or judgment, while the snobbish Alfallipe family falls apart. First, they squabble over Mennulara’s instructions about her funeral notice. Then they cause a scene at the post office, in search of the monthly allowance she used to pay them. Their stereotypical foolishness reaches a high point over her posthumous instructions to arrange the valuation of eight previously hidden crates of Greek vases. When the museum declares them fakes, the enraged masters smash all the antiquities discovered in their library, cursing Mennulara for investing in worthless copies and eventually coming to blows among themselves. A subsequent letter explains Mennulara’s cunning plan: the export license granted for the fake vases could have been used to send the real ones—now in bits—out of the country, to be sold for a fortune. Additional gossip among village worthies reveals that Mennulara had been the mistress of Judge Alfallipe and his greatest love, but the true explanation for her untouchability and Midas touch arose from her teenage rape by the son of the mafia boss, Don Vincenzo Ancona. Twenty years after the event, the don did not refuse the offer she made him: continued silence in exchange for protection, investment advice, and respect. Now her money will fund a music competition. What are you gonna do?
More Clochemerle than The Leopard, Hornby’s debut deals in types, cliché, and picturesque charm.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-18234-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
