Fantastic (and fantastical) work from a writer who appreciates that borders of all kinds are often just a fiction.
Borges meets Saunders in Tenhoff's debut collection of 10 cerebral stories that tilt toward fabulist and unfold in places real and invented, familiar and far-flung, contemporary and futuristic.
"Ten Views of the Border" establishes Tenhoff's interest in the arbitrariness of borders. Here, a town is divided in two by a painted red line for no apparent reason. More disturbing, the residents immediately obey the new restrictions on their movements. "The Involuntary Sojourner: A Case Study" tests the force of divisions as Victor, a scholar studying "involuntary sojourners," or people who find themselves in foreign countries with no memory of traveling there, seems to become the subject of his own research. Finally, in "Kurobe and the Secrets of Puppetry," puppets assume the role of masters as a celebrated puppeteer slides into dementia. The collection's more conventional character-driven stories flip the familiar narrative about the power of male desire and show just how weak and conniving men can be. In "The Visitors," a lonely dentist tries to win the affection of a recent immigrant by offering the woman's son free dental care—even though the boy's teeth are perfect. And in "Ichiban," a Japanese businessman steals money he and his wife have been saving for a house in hopes that the perfect (expensive) gift will secure the love of a woman he meets in a hostess club. Tenhoff's experimental bent occasionally yields overly abstract tales, but when humans and their contradictions take center stage, these stories soar and his insights deliver a visceral punch.
Fantastic (and fantastical) work from a writer who appreciates that borders of all kinds are often just a fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60980-964-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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