A challenging author’s take on the most challenging of subjects—the survival of our species from its distant beginnings into...
Svoboda (Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, 2016, etc.) returns to her art’s quintessential landscape to relate the overlapping epochs of the great American desert.
“Camp Clovis,” the first of the 21 stories that make up this collection, opens in the Pleistocene era among the Clovis people, a Paleo-Indian community who live in what will become the American Great Plains. The community’s teenage boys have been sent away to camp, where they will engage in “boy’s footraces, showing off underwater, crafts with leather, spear point chiseling, campfires—the usual,” to keep them out from under their mothers' feet for the long summer months. When the engaging innocence of their boyhood is threatened by elements outside their control or understanding—global climate change, overhunting of keystone species, encroachment by other cultures on Clovis’ territory—their bewildered bravado and ageless little-boyness provide a bridge from their time to our own. The final story in the collection, “Pink Pyramid,” takes place on the same land in a far distant future when almost all animals are extinct and “electronics control…even the wind, and the turning of the Earth.” The story’s unnamed male and female characters operate as a cross between scavengers and disaster tourists, drawing ever closer to the eponymous pyramid which houses the unextinguished fires of environmental holocaust. In spite of their alien surroundings—all life systems mechanized, all earth soaked with poison—these characters radiate a desire for connection, authenticity, and experience that is as familiar to a modern-day reader as it would have been to one of the Clovis boys at camp alongside their ancient river. In between, characters pack their windows against the dust of the 1930s, bury WWII’s leaking munitions under the dry soil of the South Dakota plains, get engaged in snowstorms, set dogs on fire, attend their dying relatives, disregard their living children, and generally live the sort of brief, bloody, tender, or brutal lives they have always lived in a part of the world that both sustains and destroys with its implacable emptiness. A poet, memoirist, librettist, translator, and more, Svoboda has always engaged language as a tool of exploration. Her enigmatic sentences, elliptical narratives, and percussive plots delve into the possibilities of form, genre, and plausible futures, but always with an eye on the vast subterranean psychologies of her all-too-real creations.
A challenging author’s take on the most challenging of subjects—the survival of our species from its distant beginnings into the possible future.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8142-5520-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Mad Creek/Ohio State Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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