A literary monument or a chore? Shimoni’s heavily experimental book has been likened to J.R. Gaddis’ The Recognitions and...
Interlocking tales of art, power, and the sometimes very odd behavior of creators.
Several rooms make up the landscape of Israeli writer and editor Shimoni’s long novel, which itself is made up of three pieces. The first and by far the longest, "The Lamp," is an existential detective story of sorts: on a military base, a unit charged with making training films records a poor fellow who has caught on fire, “clusters of sparks spread into the night, flying everywhere, ascending and gliding.” Enter a police investigator, who, over hundreds of pages, gets warmer and colder in solving the case, just as a camera frames a scene in close-up and then wide angle. That this is a play within a play is suggested by various subtle directions: here the director of the training film views the investigator “from a bird's eye view, from the back of a genial, fat-bellied wild goose,” even as the investigator looks at the director straight on, the master sergeant looks at the investigator “from the height of treetops, from which apples peek out with blushing faces,” and a lizard on the ceiling looks down at the investigator’s “sweaty collar and the sweat stain on his back.” The second section, "The Drawer," again with shifting POVs, describes a student who attempts to re-create a crucifixion scene from Renaissance art with human actors in a microcosmic “room in which a bloodied body is laid and bloats until filling it entirely.” The third, "The Throne," a short fable, helps explain why it is that a black ant should be such an object of fascination for the first person we meet in the book. Shimoni goes long and takes his time—and ours—in building a story whose overarching message seems to be that the world is a strange and ugly place from which only art can save us, even if art can sometimes be a strange and ugly enterprise itself.
A literary monument or a chore? Shimoni’s heavily experimental book has been likened to J.R. Gaddis’ The Recognitions and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, but it lacks their depth and humanity and shares with them mostly only their length.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62897-133-0
Page Count: 596
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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