A seasoned, deeply knowing writer with riches to share.
Intense, complicated short stories about intense, complicated people.
There are no criminals here—only ordinary people who have to live with their own mistakes, which range from schadenfreude to infidelity to burglary to accidental patricide. Each story in Trueblood's (Search Party, 2013, etc.) collection feels like a condensed version of a novel, dense with incident and crowded with fully realized characters. They unfold quickly, with frequent flashbacks and sidelong observations so insightful they are almost distracting. You have to read them carefully, or read them twice, to get the full effect. In "Skylab," a young nurse with a fine husband has an abortion so she can run off with a much older doctor, a respected man with a family of his own. They move to Malaysia to do medical relief and wind up living among tedious expats, people with native servants and a Quran study group. As the story opens, the usual plagues of heat and insects are compounded by the news that the Skylab satellite is about to fall on Asia. All this in 26 pages—and even the dogs are beautifully characterized: "She was starting to miss dogs, the easygoing, confident dogs of home. In contrast to the thin and craven animals here, they seemed, those golden retrievers with waving tails, to have been the kindly guard of everything untroubled and ordinary"; "Dogs here were like endless rings of a telephone you could not answer. The first day one had trotted past her, a female, nude and measled…wearing that beady female look of having something to do." In another favorite, "Sleepover," a grandmother and a Cambodian housekeeper are left to mind a 14th birthday party in an ultramodern lakeside palazzo in Oregon. They have help from one guest's bodyguard, who gets involved when the girls bring out the boys, booze, and pills in the wee hours. This grandmother, who channels Katharine Hepburn when the police arrive, is a terrific character—the widow of a semifamous folksinger, she's no longer close to her daughter and has recently been ditched by her beau for a younger friend. Like so many of Trueblood's characters, she rolls with the punches, which turns out to be a true form of grace.
A seasoned, deeply knowing writer with riches to share.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-618-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
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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