Formulaic, but a compelling read all the same, in a brisk style with plenty of local color.
A vivid and imaginative fictional recounting of the events of Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
Everyone who remembers the Chinese student uprisings of that year will recall the same image, broadcast across the world to international outrage: the solitary protester facing off against the tanks of the People’s Liberation Army. The young man’s audacity became one of the defining symbols of the late 20th century, but to this day his identity remains unknown. Cheng, who was born in Taiwan and grew up in the US, was inspired to write an account of the riots from the perspective of the man whose face he never saw: “What had pushed him to that point, so stupid and brave and able to transcend in such a miraculous yet mortal way?” He calls his narrator Xiao-Di. Raised in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, Xiao-Di, like most Chinese of his generation, was naturally wary of politics and eager to find his satisfaction in private life. Engaged (through a matchmaker) to marry the daughter of a local official, Xiao-Di is allowed to study abroad—at Cornell University, where he falls in love with an American girl and breaks off his engagement. When his Cornell girlfriend eventually dumps him, Xiao-Di returns home and tries to make amends to his fiancée, but her father refuses to let him in and sees to it that Xiao-Di is blackballed by every employer in Beijing. Unemployed and at loose ends, Xiao-Di drifts through the city, hanging out with his old schoolmates, who have become newly politicized by the excitement of perestroika. Xiao-Di’s older brother Lu, meanwhile, is an officer in the People’s Liberation Army. A staunch Communist, Lu is disturbed by the unrest that is spreading across the country and is eager to defend the traditions of the Party. Inevitably, the brothers meet—in Tiananmen Square.
Formulaic, but a compelling read all the same, in a brisk style with plenty of local color.Pub Date: May 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-000243-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
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
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