Think of it as a Korean rejoinder to The Name of the Rose, with some Kazantzakis thrown in for good measure.
A deepening mystery with a religious edge—and a world away from the weak tea of Dan Brown.
Sgt. Nam is a man who is neither here nor there. From a small country town in Korea, he had an adolescence so blank that it "left no memories, sad or happy.” He is not especially good at his job but not bad, either, and the job “afforded neither satisfaction nor regret.” He became a cop after dropping out of an utterly mediocre university. What he does know, with the passage of time, is that time passes too quickly, and now his own life is quickened by the discovery of an odd manuscript surrounding an even odder missing persons case, the disappeared person in question a seminarian who, as his writings reveal, had been concocting a decidedly contrarian version of Christianity that would have occasioned an auto-da-fé in an earlier time. For Sgt. Nam, “whose life had long been spent among statements written in a clichéd style full of Chinese characters, the words were barely comprehensible.” Yet, finally engaged, he presses on, hoping to find clues in the godly fellow’s writings, even as Min Yoseop’s manuscript becomes more pointed and less acquiescent to the orthodox view: if the meek and the poor are the inheritors and true owners of the world, then why do they have nothing? And more, as the protagonist asks Jesus, “Why did you so rashly show a miracle you will not employ again? Don’t you realize that you will only be able to impress them again with an even greater miracle?” Adultery, apostasy, homicide, assumed identities—all figure in the tale, even if its dominant tone is one of anomie. The story takes time to unfold, and the close is a little too obvious, but it’s an engaging intellectual mystery all the same.
Think of it as a Korean rejoinder to The Name of the Rose, with some Kazantzakis thrown in for good measure.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62897-119-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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