Ultimately, a novel that is no more (or less) than words on the page.
A debut novel that never lets readers forget it’s a novel, toying with them on multiple levels.
The Mexican author (whose essay collection, Sidewalks, is being issued concurrently in the U.S.) revels in artifice while constructing a labyrinth where memory meets lies, dead literary figures live again, and the narrative spirals through decades and various voices. Early on, it appears to be written in the voice of a female writer, perhaps an authorial stand-in, with two children (known only as “the boy” and “the baby”) and a husband who keeps reading what his wife has written, wondering what is real and what isn’t. Is she cheating on him? With men, or women, or both? Or is he cheating on her? She works for a New York publisher where her job is to find “books by Latin American writers worth translating or re-issuing.” A book such as this one, perhaps. In the process, she becomes involved in the translation of an obscure poet (who becomes one of the novel’s narrators), realizing that “the way literary recognition works, at least to a degree [is] it’s all a matter of rumor, a rumor that multiplies like a virus until it becomes a collective affinity.” The female narrative voice eventually alternates with that of her husband, from whom she becomes divorced (or not), and often the only way to tell who is narrating is a reference to the other. The results are fragmentary, funny, sexy, exasperating and perhaps post-postmodern, as the novel attempts to illuminate how to read a novel, or at least this one. “A horizontal novel, told vertically,” it informs. “A novel that has to be told from the outside to be read from within.” Though, later, it’s a “vertical novel told horizontally. A story that has to be seen from below, like Manhattan from the subway.”
Ultimately, a novel that is no more (or less) than words on the page.Pub Date: May 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56689-354-1
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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