Not groundbreaking, and sometimes overly melodramatic, but, still, a solid, engaging, and agonizingly brutal piece of work.
An interracial love story set against the harshness of Algerian colonial and civil wars.
After her father allowed her mother to be deported from Switzerland to Germany, Anna leaves home to join the circus, a peripatetic existence leading her to Algiers. There, penniless and bewildered, she leaves the troupe to help a jailed Jewish friend and is caught up in the horrors of colonialism, American wartime liberation, and racism. She also meets the equally penurious Nassreddine, a sweet Chaouï who has experienced injustices himself. With the backdrop of war, the sexually inexperienced pair develops a highly charged erotic relationship, until Nassreddine is arrested for dealing in stolen goods and spends three years in the army in Europe. Back in Africa, he tracks Anna to Madagascar, where for five years they live on a farm and have twins and he remains eager to return to his homeland. French troops arrest, interrogate and torture him during the Algerian war of independence, freedom fighters blame his giving of information for French army massacres and kill his children, and Anna disappears while he is in jail. Forty years later, Anna resurfaces in Algiers, looking for Nassreddine. The civil war rages. She sends a telegram to Nassreddine’s village and then heads off to find him, with a nine-year-old orphaned peanut-seller as guide. Rebels kidnap and brutalize them, until they escape during an army bombing of rebel positions. Finally, Nassreddine and Anna are reunited and they, along with the boy, head to the southern desert regions, still much in love. Despite the human kindness of a few minor characters, however, the story’s lingering images are the bestial bloodthirstiness and sexual predation of French and Algerian men, the inhuman victimization of the Algerian people, and the seeming futility of any solution.
Not groundbreaking, and sometimes overly melodramatic, but, still, a solid, engaging, and agonizingly brutal piece of work.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55597-404-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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