Philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human, this book sets itself the task of asking the big questions—What am I? What...
A sprawling, fragmented novel that studies the paradoxical alienation and immediacy of the digital age as it follows its twinned narrators: the author and her character, Eleanor.
Moschovakis (They and We Will Get into Trouble for This, 2016, etc.) opens her fourth book with a quintessential 21st-century scene: a woman, alone, skimming a report of a senseless act of public violence. This is Eleanor—approaching 40, adrift in her ambition and ambivalent in her love, grappling daily with “the thing that had happened—that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from happening”; literally a character in someone else’s tale. Eleanor is at a crossroads in her life, but instead of being faced with a binary decision (left or right?), she is confronted by the thoroughly modern dilemma of multiplicity. A reader, a thinker, a woman aging out of youth but still as unsettled and provisional as she was in her 20s, Eleanor can imagine herself as almost anyone, but her only stable companion is her own unsatisfactory reflection. In simultaneous, spliced sections, the reader is also introduced to Eleanor’s unnamed author—a similarly aged, similarly situated woman who is exiting a relationship with her lover, Kat, and entering into a thorny intellectual friendship with a famous male critic who has expressed interest in her manuscript. As the author and the critic’s friendship builds, the author’s struggle to maintain control over her revision against the heedless authority of male confidence leads the reader through a nuanced and provocative discourse on the power of identity as a tool of both creation and erasure. Meanwhile, compelled by the catalyst of a stolen laptop and the data it contained, Eleanor leaves New York on the trail of the enigmatic Danny Kamau—petty thief or good Samaritan—in a peripatetic quest that takes her from an Albany hostel to a “cutting-edge eco-squat,” from Addis Ababa to the Rimbaud museum in Harar. As the novel progresses, the author's and Eleanor’s stories intertwine like strands of a double helix—touching only through the laddered bonds of their shared time and place but inextricably connected by the common access of their thought.
Philosophically exhaustive yet profoundly human, this book sets itself the task of asking the big questions—What am I? What was I? What will I be?—in a style that evokes Lispector and Camus but with the self-referential and weary globalism of the current milieu. A consummately accomplished novel. A worthy treatise on the now.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-56689-508-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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