A choppy mixture of style and content that touches some emotional chords.
At home with a violent father in war-ravaged Lebanon.
Lebanese poet and novelist Khoury-Ghata, whose She Says (2003) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, addresses a formative personal episode in this semi-autobiographical novel. With both her parents now dead, the author says she is free to evoke “a reign of terror,” the destruction of her poet brother’s mind by their father’s tyrannical treatment. The father himself was a haunted man, an ex-priest who broke his vows. Suicidal, believing himself cursed by the monastery, he was a figure of rage whose loathing for his son was as irrational as it was violent. The boy was expelled from the house for having nocturnal emissions and banished to a monastery. Escaping after three months, he took up with a fringe crowd, then became the lover of an elderly Englishwoman before fleeing to Paris, where he wrote poetry and became a drug addict. The father saw poetry as “an accursed genre that spread madness” and, upon the son’s return, had him incarcerated in an asylum. There, drugs, shock treatment and years of institutionalization slowly destroyed him. This narrative is spliced between stories of the family’s neighbors, who shared a group of five houses. There are magical-realist episodes—a weeping image of the Holy Virgin, the reappearance of a dead dog—and darker tales, like the death of a young mother in childbirth after her husband refuses medical intervention. The Lebanese civil war resulted in the brother’s release from the asylum. He returned to his mother’s love and to his father’s unyielding hostility. Khoury-Ghata’s postscript reveals that she and her sisters have taken up writing in honor of the brother who “had all his links with writing cut.”
A choppy mixture of style and content that touches some emotional chords.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55597-434-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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