A first novel from Trinidadian-born Brand, now living in Canada, that's more prose poem than conventional fiction, unevenly evoking the relationship of two Caribbean women caught up in a revolution. The account of Elizete and Verlia's meeting, their love, and their tragic parting is told in sections that are an uneasy mix of poetic dreams on the one hand and politics on the other (Marx, Che, Fanon, and other Left-ish idols are quoted). Elizete, abandoned by her mother, begins with her memories of being brought up by a childless woman who told her stories of the slaves and their secret rebellions. When the woman died, Elizete was ``given'' to Isaiah, a brutal farmworker who beat and raped her. But her miserable life spent satisfying Isaiah by night and cutting cane by day changes when Verlia arrives from Canada. Verlia has come to organize the local cane-workers. (The island is nameless, but it's history resembles that of Grenada.) The two women fall in love, and after the uprising fails, Elizete heads to Toronto in search of Verlia, who by then has disappeared. In Toronto, she experiences anguish and repeated (and melodramatic) indignities. The rigidity of the political subtext—the wickedness of whites and the inadequacies of men—repeatedly subverts the story. After many travails, Elizete arrives at a center run by Abena, a former lover of Verlia's. Verlia, also Caribbean-born, in turn describes her feelings of alienation from her birthplace; her journey to Canada, which ended not in a college education but in service in of the political movement; the comfort of Elizete's affection; and the failure of the revolution she helped make. Love like theirs is doomed, and as the revolt is quashed, Verlia, it turns out, has come to a bitter end. Luminous prose and some on-target insights into the immigrant experience, but the polemic and the passion seem more contrived, however artfully addressed, than fresh and persuasive.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8021-1622-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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