Many will take to these domestic particulars as to milk and honey.
Third adult novel by former YA writer Farish (If the Tiger, 1995, etc.), perhaps her most densely gestated and slowly delivered to the reader.
Virginia Woolf wanted not only a room of her own but her own sentence as well, not a male sentence marching its appointed rounds but a feminine sentence. Farish has taken up the fight by writing whole pages that feed on feminine sentience: the dark crinkling of pregnant nipples and the spruce smell of male skin amid queasy shifts of a woman’s hungers and moods. Here, she tells of fraying ties in a backwoods New Hampshire family and among members of a faded commune over 25 years. She dwells almost entirely on household detail and crossed feelings and much less on story. The characters pull or drift apart and come back together and part again. Christy Mahon returns from Vietnam with a neurosis about trip mines. His wartime duty was to sweep for mines ahead of advancing troops, and one day a close friend sweeping beside him was blown up. Now 29, a homesteader, and a history teacher at Franconia College—a kind of university for social dropouts during and after the war—Christy lives in the woods and still looks for land mines wherever he walks. Deborah Getsinger, 19, meets him on the beach near Portsmouth, falls for him, has sex with him, and follows him into his woods. They marry, part, remarry, part. We live with them through the seasons, canning tomatoes, plastering walls, raising son Ian to adulthood, and through their various friendships and loves, including Sonia, Deborah’s closest friend, and in the love that Sonia’s daughter, Patience, has for Ian. Feelings strained and rebuilt—evoked in engaging dialogue and the smells of apples and rainfall, in the heavy weight of a big Christmas get-together, even in the color in a scarf—form a crunchy humus on which the reader treads from one page to the next.
Many will take to these domestic particulars as to milk and honey.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-883642-52-3
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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