Elegant, lyrical tales woven with melancholy and world-weariness—but also with a curious optimism. A gem.
Long-awaited new collection of stories by Russian writer and former talk show host Tolstaya (The White Walls: Collected Stories, 2007, etc.).
Related to Leo Tolstoy (albeit distantly) as well as Ivan Turgenev, her grandfather the science-fiction and historical novelist Aleksey Tolstoy, Tolstaya admits in the opening, semiautobiographical story “20/20” to having the latter’s “ability to daydream…although not to the same extent.” That story goes on to describe a period of blindness following eye surgery, when she discovered the ability to see, not just remember, the past and enter a “heretofore invisible, hidden world” of the imagination. A poet of silences and small gestures, Tolstaya often writes of love, if sometimes love that has gone off the rails because one or the other of the partners is either not listening or asking the wrong questions; says Eric, the illicit lover of one émigré academic, “Tell me something surprising about your alphabet. The Russian alphabet.” Answering that it has a letter that represents, yes, “a certain type of silence,” she wonders why he wants to know, inasmuch as he has no intention of learning Russian and therefore no need for that bit of information. And what of mere curiosity? Well, that way lies trouble. Several stories are set on campus, but some of the most memorable take place in quiet places such as the Russian woods far from the city: “It’s the most important place in the world—nowhere,” Tolstaya writes. Meanwhile, in the city, life’s daily difficulties mount: in a wonderful aperçu, a beleaguered apartment dweller in the middle of a renovation notes that, as the famed clay tablets of early Greek civilization recorded that a carpenter named Tirieus didn’t show up for work, contemporary carpenters are just as "eternally flaky": “a Russian carpenter (or plumber, tile layer, spackler) stretches out his arm to his Mycenaean brethren across millennia: Workers of the world unite, if not in space then in time.”
Elegant, lyrical tales woven with melancholy and world-weariness—but also with a curious optimism. A gem.Pub Date: March 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3277-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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