An ebullient meditation on language and time that feels strikingly significant in the present moment.
In this slim, impactful novel, surrealist master Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear, 2016, etc.) imagines a dystopian Japan reckoning with its own identity.
In the wake of an economic and environmental tragedy that eerily echoes 2011’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government implements an “isolation policy,” cutting the country off from the outside world. Central Tokyo is deserted, the country’s soil is contaminated, its plants have mutated, and its people are living under a capricious governing body that has not only waged a war on words (the term “mutation” having been replaced by the more agreeable “environmental adaptation”), but has proven to have a penchant for tinkering with the laws: “Afraid of getting burned by laws they couldn’t see, everyone kept their intuition honed as sharp as a knife, practicing restraint and self-censorship on a daily basis.” A writer unsettled by the turn his country has taken, Yoshiro’s main concern is the declining health of his grandson, Mumei. In this new era, children are wise beyond their years, but their bodies are brittle, aging vessels, and the elderly have become a new kind of species, cursed with the gift of everlasting life, “burdened with the terrible task of watching their great-grandchildren die.” Left in Yoshiro’s care after the death of his mother and disappearance of his father, Mumei, feeble (and toothless) as he is, fills his grandfather’s interminable days with life. Despite the gloomy circumstances, Tawada’s narrative remains incandescent as she charts the hopeful paths both grandfather and grandson embark upon in their attempt to overcome mortality’s grim restraints. Striving to persist in a time when intolerance abounds and “the shelf life of words [is] getting shorter all the time,” Mumei’s searching curiosity and wonder toward the world inspire faith that, even in the darkest of days, humanity cannot be forsaken.
An ebullient meditation on language and time that feels strikingly significant in the present moment.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2762-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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