Yi’s novella complicates our understanding of relations between North and South, warring places so different that...
A modest but quietly controversial look at two very different Koreas, questioning long-held orthodoxies.
North Korea is widely held to be among the world’s most awful places. But, suggests prolific South Korean novelist Yi in a moment that seems almost calculated to draw official scrutiny, perhaps it’s not so awful as all that. Says the North Korean half brother of a South Korean professor during a not entirely planned-out reunion, asked how he’s doing, “Do you want me to tell you how we’re starving and can’t get enough corn gruel to eat?” Conversely, the North Korean semblable wonders how it is that the invading Americans managed to miss their chance to massacre his newly found half brother and his family during the war. Yi’s premise is fruitful: it was the South Korean’s father with whom he was to be reunited, having fled to the North in sympathy with the Communists during the war; that he has other family across the barbed wire is a surprise to him. It is also a surprise for him to learn that his life is as strictly regimented as any in the land of the Kim dynasty: “I could be arrested under the National Security Law,” the South Korean allows, “for illegally crossing the border and having a clandestine meeting.” Yi gets in a few sly digs at both stereotypes and their perpetrators, as when, recounting an academic summit, he depicts the South Koreans as more doctrinaire than their northern brethren: “I tried to introduce the South Koreans to people who were a bit more open-minded and less political,” says a cultural emissary, “since they themselves seemed to have a bit of a—how should I put it?—radical slant.”
Yi’s novella complicates our understanding of relations between North and South, warring places so different that reconciliation—to say nothing of reunification—seems impossible.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-17864-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
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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