Draped lightly on the reader, Lopez’s moral fiber offers a protection against diminishment and offers security for acting on...
Nine vignettes framed as letters addressing questions of personal responsibility in a diminished world: obliquely revelatory yet fiercely biting.
The letters come from writers and activists on the lam from what may be perceived as threats from the Office of Homeland Security, though Lopez (Light Action in the Caribbean, 2000, etc.), a National Book Award–winner, is not so bald as to state the threat as such (he terms it “Inland Security, the group of people we had come to call the Idiots of Light”). As ever, Lopez’s writing is economical, full of silences demanding that the reader unfold the mysteries embedded in them. But the mind’s eye is fully nourished; Lopez uses each letter-writer’s sense of place as context, circumstance, opportunity, and beauty: seams of lapis lazuli, the braided perfume of orchids and ridisses, the primed landscape that glitters at its edges, “the wordless kinship . . . an elusive and elevated physical sense of being present in the world.” Yet place and nature aren’t paramount in Lopez’s concerns, as is often the case; rather, the inner struggles—devotion to life, love, tolerance, innocence, and ideals of justice—occupy center stage with the force of concentrated light. The letter-writers are indigenous rights workers, social historians, translators, civil rights advocates, land activists, ex-soldiers, curators, and artists, each of them a threat to fear-mongering, indifference, goose-stepping, and state scrutiny. This is because they work to dodge the memory hole—“everything, even the buffalo, is still around . . . as long as people are telling stories about them”—and because they envision “what it can mean to have your country under you like a hammock . . . instead of using your people as fodder in a war to control the world’s meaning and expression.”
Draped lightly on the reader, Lopez’s moral fiber offers a protection against diminishment and offers security for acting on awareness, coherence, decency, and grace. (Nine monotypes by Alan Magee.)Pub Date: June 13, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4220-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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