Striking New Age novel about a woman who is drawn to an enigmatic store through which she begins a spiritual journey involving beings from ancient and traditional cultures inhabiting the raw landscape.
Feeling disconnected from her life, a woman named Jessie stumbles on a “bone-white” store by the lakeshore in northern New Mexico. A heavy wrought-iron sign reads “Weather’s Store,” and the place gives Jessie the sensation of an old dream. From there, she meets the mysterious, green-eyed Weather and is introduced to a host of characters, including frightening Indian witches; Maya, a weaver and healer; surreal, powerful women spirits; Azteca Marta, an herbalist; Marta’s son Mateo, the blended soul of New Mexico; old Juan Antonio; and a heartbreaking, hopeless Indian adolescent. Alternately frustrated, confused, awed and intrigued, Jessie comes to a deeper understanding and acceptance of her destiny through these mystical mentors and guides. Unlike traditional novels, Giomi’s work presents a series of parables and haikus utilizing the land, cultures and people of New Mexico, to which the author, a native of the same region, feels a deep connection. These fragments can have elegance and depth, such as when homemade crosses marking death are equated to “resting places…reminders to stop and remember and, then with infinite patience, to bless what must be left behind.” Giomi doesn’t romanticize the primitivism and poverty of this part of the world while recognizing its power, beauty and sacred quality and respecting its wisdom. She touches on the tragic alcoholism prevalent among Native Americans, particularly youth, who are “trapped between two worlds” and often die young of alcohol abuse, homicide, suicide and despair. Her background as a psychologist occasionally reflects in the “work” Jessie is encouraged to do (“To embark on any journey…you must confront what is hiding in the darkness” or “admit the wound”), but the ultimate journey is metaphysical, a reclamation of the soul. Weather is represented literally by rain, winds and snow and becomes a metaphor for the tempests of the human spirit. One woman’s search for self in New Mexico achieves an abstract, meditative beauty.
Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460930588
Page Count: 211
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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