A grim but compelling composite portrait by a talented writer.
The third book from Szalay, one of Granta's most recent group of Best Young British Novelists, is a tightly woven, precisely observed novel in stories, nine of them, about men adrift, lonely, wandering, and wondering.
The book's conceit is imaginative, its architecture impressive. The men depicted range in age from 17 (a callow, awkward university student on a budget trip through Europe with his more outgoing and lusty friend) to 73 (a retired government minister on a winter trip to his damp, mouse-infested cottage in Italy, where he's retreated not so much to lick his wounds as to catalog his infirmities as old age settles in). In between we meet a drifting young French tourist in search of sex and adventure who finds them in an unexpected form, or rather forms; a hypocritical Danish tabloid journalist chasing a scandal; a middle-aged English blowhard and expat in Croatia whose life is in epic collapse; and a Russian oligarch whose empires of metallurgy, marriage, and self-created mythology are crumbling. These men and the others (a selfish academic medievalist whose girlfriend is pregnant, a Hungarian bodyguard who's fallen in love with the jet-setting prostitute he's protecting, and a seller of high-end real estate who's chafing at his sense of being settled) resemble one another in several ways. All are sex- and/or power-obsessed, all away from home, all solitary, all in the grips of overwhelming inertia and of the philosophic realization, in some cases explicit and in some tacit, that "Life is not a joke." One may wish their circumstances were less cramped and airless, their ideas of manhood more capacious (and that women played a fuller role in their lives), but Szalay writes with subtlety and pathos about these flawed and floundering figures, none quite able to feel like the protagonist of his own life story.
A grim but compelling composite portrait by a talented writer.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55597-753-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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