Poet Cotler’s (Sonnets to the Humans, 2012, etc.) affecting, lyric novel is a long letter from writer Rider Sonnenreich to his sister Leya, its subject nothing less than the mind of an artist.
Both Rider and his sister repeatedly suffered “glimmers” (seizures) as children, and Leya has come to represent something of Rider’s muse, a complicated, ephemeral figure whom he doesn’t wholly understand, yet he’s drawn to her and makes her the subject of his art. She exists mostly in the folds of his memory, though, and readers learn in the opening pages that she has disappeared to Europe, of which Rider remarks: “It’s beautiful enough.” At the behest of his mother, he bums around different European cities, supposedly looking for her but finding instead a variety of bohemians whom he regards like a poet. When he eventually reconnects with her, his memory blends with her present incarnation, which involves dissociation and a bathtub slicked with vomit. Readers looking for a tidy travel narrative should look elsewhere; one scene here takes place in “Gigot’s annex,” full of slightly stoned Italians and expats, and Rider imagines himself there as a boy who would “squat in the corner and cover [his] ears” if given his way. In the same scene, he reveals that he “wouldn’t mind becoming sharper, crazy I mean, not weak-minded crazy. Subtle disconnections.” It’s the voice of a poet in Europe: romantic and sarcastic to the bone, simultaneously jaded and full of wonder. Featuring this kind of overt meditation that’s often on a writer’s mind can be risky, but Cotler pulls it off, injecting feeling into each image, each response, each gesture. It’s no slight to call this a poet’s novel—its narrative thrust is a lyrical one, its strengths are its precision of thought and image, variety of prose and the depth of its meditations. The novel is addressed to the sister, in second person, casting the reader as a voyeur. Or is it really the reader who is addressed, cast as the sister, to whom the poet addresses his interior missives? Cotler stays one step ahead: “Art, I guess, can unintentionally insult the viewer by presuming to include him.” A beautiful, disturbing portrait of an artist.
Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1849822459
Page Count: 224
Publisher: MP Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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