Another astonishingly beautiful story from Makine (Once Upon the River Love, 1998), this one unutterably sad, plumbing the depths of an ÇmigrÇ Russian mother’s despair at the course of her son’s sexual awakening during the bitter postwar winter of 1946 in rural France. Fittingly enough, Princess Arbyelina’s tragedy is related over the course of a long night by the gatekeeper at the cemetery where she’s buried. He starts by describing a summer scene of two wet bodies on a riverbank: one, Olga’s, alive but clothed in tatters and unmoving; the other, a corpulent, suited ex-Russian officer, freshly dead. How they came to be there involves the previous winter, the worst in a century, and the ÇmigrÇ community settled in an abandoned brewery nearby. Olga, a refugee battered in her flight from the Bolsheviks and abandoned by her husband in Paris, arrived with her young son shortly before the war began, keeping largely to herself while running the community library. By 1946, she has a poet-lover in Paris who no longer excites her and a restless, brooding teenager whose youth has been transmuted through the crucible of hemophilia. With the onset of winter, Olga begins sleeping in a strange, leaden manner, which she slowly realizes is the result of her son drugging her nightly tea. This discovery leads to another even more unthinkable, and as she grapples with a knowledge that she can share with no one, she finds herself unable to alter what’s going on. An end comes to it, finally—in the shape of a corpse on a riverbank—though for Olga that end brings the loss of what little grip on reality she has left. As chilling and finely charted a descent into madness as has ever been imagined, with many extraordinary moments along the way: all imbued with a wrenching combination of love and despair, fire and ice.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-494-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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