Not an easy book to grapple with, but the reader’s struggle will yield rewards.
Complex personal and family histories are painstakingly disentangled in this elliptical yet engrossing novel from the Massachusetts-based author of Ambassador of the Dead (2001, etc.).
The narrator, James Pak, a young civil servant and historian, branches out from his job with the U.S. Counsel of Public Affairs in Vienna when he “investigates” the suicide of his troubled father, Andrew, 16 years earlier. Andrew’s roots in the Ukraine are traced during a succession of journeys and meetings, undertaken by James as he visits Andrew’s childhood friend, Marian, in England, then moves eastward to track down his aged paternal grandmother, Vera, her world-weary, cynical son, Kij, and, eventually, another scion of Vera’s blighted family, who knows what removed the deracinated Andrew from the orbit of those who should have loved and protected him. Personal testimony and flashbacks commingle bafflingly, as James approaches, recoils from and submits to agonizing realizations hitherto unforeseen. “The only peace of mind I’ve ever known has come from the process of giving a shape to the past,” he tells himself. But the shape is that of a nightmare, as evidenced during a tense transcontinental train journey, a submissive vigil at the moribund Vera’s bedside and the reception of a horrific “message” sent to the chastened Kij, from whom James learns the secret (the first of many) concealed in the novel’s title. There’s more embedded in three objects James “inherits”: a letter written in an unknown language, Andrew’s military papers and an oversized glass jar (it’s Pandora’s box, James discovers). In its brooding focus on the breakup of a corrupt old world infecting the one that succeeds it, Melnyczuk’s hallucinatory tale achieves some of the fierce, distracting power of D.H. Lawrence’s nerve-grating masterpiece Women in Love.
Not an easy book to grapple with, but the reader’s struggle will yield rewards.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55597-491-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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