A rich, unruly work, intermittently skimpy and chaotic. And, in its best pages (of which there are a fortunate many), a...
The up-and-down life and times of a globetrotting author-adventurer, chronicled with exuberant wit and romantic gusto.
Like Boyd’s The New Confessions (1988), Any Human Heart is a panoramic picaresque. It details in nine chronologically arranged (and footnoted) journals their eponymous author’s experiences in South America (where he’s born, to a British meat-packing executive and his Uruguayan secretary), at an English public school, and later in Oxford, and thereafter on several continents, often in the company of the great and near-great. After showing early promise as a writer, Logan (1906–91) becomes a correspondent covering the Spanish Civil War. In Paris, Hemingway and Fitzgerald accept him as a peer (as will such eminences as Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh—though Virginia Woolf isn’t much impressed). Picasso sketches him; and Logan’s quick study of Europe’s art milieu gains him possession of valuable paintings that will enrich and complicate his later years. But in the meantime he works for British Naval Intelligence under Ian Fleming, goes to the Bahamas to observe suspicious behavior by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, spends time in a Swiss POW camp, lives down and out in London, becomes involved with the murderous German Baader-Meinhof terrorist gang in the early 1970s, and rebounds as a successful Manhattan art dealer (in a sequence that recalls Boyd’s hoax “biography” of a nonexistent artist: Nat Tate), before eventually retiring to the French countryside. The tale is lively and likable, if awfully anecdotal, and perversely given to serial name-dropping. The titled journals are furthermore of very uneven quality—though those dealing with “The Second World War” and “The Post-War” contain some of Boyd’s best writing. And Logan is really less a fully realized character than a recording device. But what a device.
A rich, unruly work, intermittently skimpy and chaotic. And, in its best pages (of which there are a fortunate many), a nearly irresistible entertainment.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-41493-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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
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