A delicate study of a young girl’s maturation, airy and filled with imagery of light, at times advancing unevenly, but more...
An autobiographical novel by Swedish novelist, poet, and playwright Pleijel about a young woman's search for meaning, identity, and independence.
When she learns of a fortuneteller’s prophecy of her beloved aunt’s life and death, Neta is swept up in the possibilities for romance and adventure it contains but also comforted by an underlying sense of order to the world in the predestination of a life's events. Tossed in the chaos of adolescence and emerging sexuality, and increasingly aware of the instability coursing beneath her family’s seemingly indissoluble bonds, Neta craves coherence and balance: between the unknown and the tangible; her hyperlogical mathematician father and her intense, volatile musician mother; the potential for a supernatural world and the earthly concerns of the everyday. As a young girl, she seeks deeper truths through religion but finds herself unable to believe. When her foray into faith fails, Neta performs a musical number in a school production and is seduced by the power of imitation, of pretending to be a more confident person than she is. She becomes preoccupied with simulating passion though is unable, too, to forge a real connection or fall in love, wandering numbly from partner to partner. Desperate to differentiate herself from her family, her town, her suffocating mother, Neta's awareness and self-knowledge deepen, and she tumbles through the revelations of a girl, then young woman, finally finding space for her mind's expansion in the study of philosophy and literature. The story occasionally loses its forward drive and turns episodic but is overall deeply inquisitive, as Pleijel explores the mysteries of what it is to be alive, to be connected to family while inhabiting the self alone, to love, to seek and live a life of meaning.
A delicate study of a young girl’s maturation, airy and filled with imagery of light, at times advancing unevenly, but more often funny, familiar, and profound.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59051-830-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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