Look at the harlequins — trees, words, "situations and sums. . . jokes, images. . . Play! Invent the world! Invent reality." Thus the advice of an aunt to Vadim Vadimovich, during the childhood of this Russian born writer who emigrated to England and then Paris and then Germany and then the U.S., who now has written this theoretically "oblique" recit of his books and his wives although — under the slight maquillage of the harlequin — Vadim is of course none other than. Part of the pleasure for some will be the familiar ground (tired ground?) where butterflies fly above the flora or the nymphets in the grass — where the clef almost seems larger than the roman, or those other romans all with new names just slightly transposed, particularly Ardis, "my poor dead love" — the "best of my English romaunts." Was it? In between Vadim tells his story of his strange illness called the "numerical nimbus syndrome" in which he can't envision a volte-face — something seems very wrong with his sense of direction. . . from his first love for Iris in Cannice who doesn't speak at all until she begins to speak like a novelette, to his later love for Bel, his own daughter. . .and hovering here and there, another character Dementia — who will help him to realize in his late, late years how he has indeed confused direction with duration — his "fatidic" (prophetic) problem. But when all is said and done — the "jokes and images," the emblematic paraphernalia, the upsidedown referrals, riddles and diddles — one is troubled with the sad notion of a man spooked by the specter of duration trying to corroborate or commemorate himself by merely toying with his past achievements. We are more comfortable remembering the truly great writer who wrote his own syllogistic epitaph in Pale Fire: "Other men die; but I/Am not another; therefore I'll not die.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1974
ISBN: 0679727280
Page Count: 251
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1974
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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