Like all the best postmodern novels, this metafictional investigation of time, memory, and the mutating self is as playful...
An author named S.H. finds the journal she kept during her first year in Manhattan in the late 1970s, unlocking memories of a quirky neighbor, a half-finished novel, and a disastrous date.
"We differ, my former self and I. It was impossible for me to know at twenty-three that the dreadful phrase 'life is short' has meaning, that at sixty-one I know there is far less ahead of me than behind me, and that while she wasn't terribly curious about herself as herself, I have become curious about her as an incarnation of hopes and errors that had or seem to have had a determining effect on what I am now." Back then, S.H. was called Minnesota by her friends. She was trying to write a novel about a teenage detective who worships Sherlock Holmes (hmmm, also S.H.!). She had a best friend named Whitney whom she met at a John Ashbery reading in SoHo; Whitney made "poem-objects" and wore green high heels and a yellow beret. Financially, however, things weren't going so well—Minnesota was reduced to scavenging for dinner in trash cans before she landed a job ghostwriting the memoirs of a socialite named Elena Bergthaler. Meanwhile, she spent a good portion of every day eavesdropping on her next-door neighbor, Lucy, a woman whose conversations were so strange and filled with violent imagery that Minnesota and her friends developed wild competing theories to explain them. None were stranger than what turned out to be the truth, which Minnesota learned after Lucy emerged from her apartment one night to save her from an evil young man. The book includes whimsical illustrations by the author, among them a caricature of Donald Trump with S.H.'s 94-year-old mother's comment as caption—"Can that man be president?"
Like all the best postmodern novels, this metafictional investigation of time, memory, and the mutating self is as playful as it is serious.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-0283-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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