A deeply flawed great novel, akin to the best work of Zola, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and, arguably, Rabelais.
The lives of two stepbrothers, temperamental opposites nevertheless sworn to love and protect each other, are traced, in exuberant and exhausting detail, in this massive novel, originally published in Taiwan in two volumes in 2005 and 2006.
Chinese author Yu Hua (Cries in the Drizzle, 2007, etc.) creates a rich panorama of post-Mao China during the 1990s, when loose-cannon entrepreneur “Baldy Li” (Li Guan) and his gentle, scholarly “brother” Song Gang follow different paths, despite and because of their shared attraction to Lin Hong, the reigning beauty of the village (Liu Town) in which they grow up, after Baldy Li’s widowed mother Li Lan marries Song Gang’s handsome, intrepid father Song Fenping. When the latter is murdered for being a landowner supposedly unsympathetic to revolutionary principles, Li Lan wastes away, but lives long enough to extract her sons’ promises to honor Song Fenping’s loving nature. But when Song Gang achieves fulfillment in a quiet contemplative life, having won the hand of Lin Hong, Baldy Li hatches one hare-brained moneymaking scheme after another, enlisting creditors from several briskly characterized townsmen and reaching a peak of commercially viable vulgarity with the creation of a “National Virgin Beauty Competition,” whose contestants benefit from surgically implanted artificial hymens. Comparisons to China’s flamboyant image-building during the recent Beijing Olympics are doubtless inevitable. But the novel is even more interesting for the pointed, often hilarious connections Yu Hua makes between the care and manipulation (and voyeuristic observation) of female bodies, and the various “makeovers” to which modern China has subjected itself. The novel is cheerfully vulgar and obscene, insistently declarative and overemphatic. But it’s gripping throughout 600-plus pages, and it rises to a tremendous climax, after Baldy Li’s furious acquisitive energies have precipitated tragedy and created monsters that seem to have emerged, sweating and shrieking, from the realms of myth.
A deeply flawed great novel, akin to the best work of Zola, Louis-Ferdinand Céline and, arguably, Rabelais.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42499-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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