Whimsy and wit float through these stories like fairy dust, and while the enchantment sometimes has a mechanical quality,...
Ten clever tales in a philosophical vein, often delicately surreal, from novelist Brownrigg (The Metaphysical Touch, 1999), who muses on the place of women in every capacity from makers of the world’s wonders to givers of parties.
The first story, “Amazon,” is perhaps the least effective, presenting a nebulous image of a pair of female wonder-workers responsible for everything from the pyramids to the Golden Gate Bridge; the older finally retires to let her assistant take over. Subsequent stories, though, offer in detail situations both more substantial and more profound. “The Bird Chick” tells of a woman who cares for the birds in a city park and speaks to them, coming to have such power over them that she can direct them in a performance of Hamlet, a performance that changes the lives of those who see it. There are other strong links between woman and the natural world: “The Broad from Abroad” is a visitor to the city who speaks of her male friends Henry, Joseph, and Bob—each one a forest—with great fondness, even as she indicates a preference for city life because there she can talk and be talked to; and “Mistress of Many Moons” is interviewed about her romances and intimacy with the masters of the night sky. More melancholy and down-to-earth, perhaps, are “She Who Caught Buses,” about a librarian whose prejudices toward a certain group of people, the Chranks, are explained by a childhood experience in which they sank to the bottom of a pond to find the treasure she had yearned for; and the party story, “Mars Needs Women,” about a caterer, confronted with a bash to which no one came, decides to move to Mars.
Whimsy and wit float through these stories like fairy dust, and while the enchantment sometimes has a mechanical quality, mostly it can bring about wonder and delight.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-27289-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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
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