Strongly written and intelligent evocation, in well-rendered settings, of the darker side of love and friendship.
An absorbing and disquieting tale of love, friendship, and betrayal: debut fiction written by Australian author Johnson during her first pregnancy (see her memoir, A Better Woman, p. 160).
The story is set mostly in 1980s Hong Kong as the lives of three characters intersect as each struggles to find fulfillment in their otherwise successful lives. First, there are artist Rachel Gallagher and her friend and fellow artist Anne-Louise Buchan, who meet while working for a fashion magazine in Sydney. Anne-Louise is outrageous, daring, and ambitious, while Rachel is timid and conventional—“an acceptor,” not a “striver” like Anne-Louise. When the two have saved enough money, they head for Europe, determined to become real artists. But Anne-Louise becomes manic and suffers a breakdown as she tries to paint what she believes is a great insight into life; after Anne-Louise recovers, Rachel returns to Australia and becomes a prizewinning artist. Eventually, Anne-Louise moves to Hong Kong to work for an international organization, and there she meets the third member of the triangle, handsome Martin Bannister, just as troubled and driven as Anne-Louise. A coolheaded money trader and financial whiz, he is far less sure-footed in his personal life: he was in his 20s before he met his father for the first time; his unstable mother abandoned him as a baby (then reclaimed him some years later, after she had remarried); and Martin himself is divorced. He’s also a sadist, finding sexual release in abusing prostitutes. During a reunion with Anne-Louise in Hong Kong, Rachel learns that her erstwhile friend is in love with Martin, and later meets him. But Anne-Louise’s old demons return, and Rachel, after seeking Martin’s assistance, does something with unforgivable and terrible consequences for both her and Anne-Louise.
Strongly written and intelligent evocation, in well-rendered settings, of the darker side of love and friendship.Pub Date: April 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-7434-3777-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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