If your bookshelf only has room for one anthology of Sanjanian fiction, this is it.
The conceptual ingenuity of this volume—an anthology that purports to document the literary progression and legacy of an imaginary island—offers flashes of metafictional illumination amid what often reads like an elaborate in-joke.
While promoted as the second novel by Marche (Raymond and Hannah, 2005), this reads more like a collection of short (some very short) stories by a variety of writers spanning more than a century in the history of the island of Sanjania. The forword by the esteemed (and fictional) Leonard King, identified as a frequent Nobel nominee, proclaims that “Sanjanians are perhaps the most literary people on earth,” while the preface by the (nonfictional) Stephen Marche traces the literary history of a country as it moves from dialects (every cove apparently has its own patois) toward the “clean school” of writing, which attempted to transcend such regional differences, and from colonialism to independence. It begins with early “pamphlet” fiction, with such familiar readymades as a prostitute’s fall and redemption, a Sherlockian sleuth and an African adventure. The wordplay dialect in these stories falls somewhere between Joyce and Jabberwocky. As the preface and a concluding section of criticism suggest, as Sanjania struggled to shake off Britain’s colonial yoke and assert its independence, some of its fiction conveyed its message through code, as stories of oppression and resistance took the form of metaphors, and writers moved from the more colorful idiosyncrasies of cove language toward a more standard English. The 20th century finds some of the country’s leading literary lights in self-imposed exile, with the more modern stories from the Sanjanian diaspora capable of standing on their own outside this fictional construct. Yet “A Wedding in Restitution,” one of the last and longest stories, suggests an earlier island innocence in its fable-like tone. The biographical notes on the fictional writers provide yet another layer of context, further distancing the author from his creation (though there’s a note on Marche as well).
If your bookshelf only has room for one anthology of Sanjanian fiction, this is it.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59448-941-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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