Taken alone, the narrator's self-absorption would be grating, but her story resonates powerfully within the saga of three...
With this story about a contemporary Harvard-educated Bangladeshi woman struggling to be true to herself as well as her heritage, Anam completes her three-generation trilogy about Bangladesh.
Anam’s A Golden Age (2008) tells the story of the Bangladesh civil war against Pakistan through the eyes of a widow who makes self-sacrificing choices for the sake of her children. Set more than a decade later, The Good Muslim (2011) focuses on the widow’s daughter, Maya, now a doctor. Now comes this book-length narrative from Maya’s adopted daughter, Zubaida, to Elijah, the American lover she has forsaken but hopes to win back with her written explanation, a form that allows Anam to introduce names and snatches of information as foreshadowings that she fleshes out later. A highly educated paleontologist, Zubaida always expected to return home to Bangladesh and marry Rashid, whom she’s known all her life as the son of her parents’ closest friends. But then she meets philosophy grad-school dropout Elijah at a Shostakovich concert only days before leaving her lab in Cambridge for a dig in Pakistan. The chemistry is immediate, and when Zubaida gets to Pakistan, they communicate through song lyrics. But the dig, where she hoped to find the complete skeleton of Ambulocetus natans, a whale that lived on both land and in the sea, goes tragically wrong. Zubaida flies home to Bangladesh, where Rashid presses marriage. Longing for Elijah, she finally lets Rashid's and their families’ wishes prevail, but one day into the marriage she realizes “the depths of [her] mistake." After a miscarriage, she finds temporary respite interviewing mistreated workers taking apart ships in the port town of Chittagong. There, her romantic confusion comes to a crisis point, as does her growing obsession with finding her biological roots.
Taken alone, the narrator's self-absorption would be grating, but her story resonates powerfully within the saga of three generations of women personifying Bangladesh’s evolution from the clarity of revolution to the confusions of assimilation with the larger world.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-147894-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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