Doerr (Four Seasons in Rome, 2007, etc.) moves the reader gracefully from place to place (the stories span four continents),...
A collection of six stories—at least one long enough to be considered a novella—that illustrate Doerr’s sparse style, command of language and mastery of characterization.
The title story, the most elaborate in the collection, features the “harvesting” of the memories of 74-year-old Alma Konachek, who lives in a suburb of Cape Town. Three years earlier her husband, Harold, died immediately after discovering a rare fossil in the Great Karoo, a desert region in South Africa. Because the find is valuable as well as rare, a “memory tapper” breaks into Alma’s home, seeking the cartridges containing memories that have been harvested from wealthy people. While Luvo, the tapper, reviews the cartridges, the reader becomes aware of Alma’s past home and family life as well as the tensions in her marriage. Eventually, Luvo and his mentor Roger find the right cartridge and are able to retrieve the fossil, something of a miracle since the late Harold Konachek is convinced that the only permanent thing is change. The next story, “Procreate, Generate,” follows the heartbreaking story of Herb and Imogene, who after ten years of marriage decide they want children and are unable to conceive. The story almost reads like a documentary of their struggles with in vitro fertilization and the strain it places on their marriage. They finally conclude that “Nothingness is the rule. Life is the exception.” In “The Demilitarized Zone,” Doerr tells the story of an American soldier in Korea who buries a crane that hit a communications wire and almost gets court-martialed for his humanitarian act. In epistolary form, the story makes these implausible events both believable and moving.
Doerr (Four Seasons in Rome, 2007, etc.) moves the reader gracefully from place to place (the stories span four continents), from incident to incident, and from memorable character to memorable character by focusing on small acts that have larger resonances.Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8280-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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