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QUICKSAND

Name: QUICKSAND
Author: Emmanuel Bove
ISBN: 0-910395-69-1

by Emmanuel Bove ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 30, 1991

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A first appearance in English by the late French writer and early minimalist Bove (Armand, 1987; My Friends, 1986) of a novel published in France in 1945, a few months after his death, that stunningly delineates the eventual heroism of an Everyman. In terse but subtle prose, which only heightens the tension as Bove's luckless hero Joseph Bridet, a journalist, sinks deeper into the quicksand, Bove describes an ordinary man trying to survive in extraordinary times. When the Germans invade France in 1940, Bridet flees with his wife, Yolande, to Vichy France. There, he hopes to pass himself off as a devoted citizen of the collaborationist regime so that he might get a passport to go to Africa, where he can join the Gaullists and fight for France's liberation. But he is unable to sound convincing enough, and his contacts soon suspect his motives. Meanwhile, his own unease grows, and in a series of chilling bureaucratic encounters he decides that he is under suspicion and should return to Occupied France. But Bridet is not safe there either: no one can be trusted; the Germans become suspicious; and he is interned. When German soldiers are killed by the local resistance, Bridet is made one of the hostages. Nervous- -and cowardly all his life—Bridet then has one of ``those simple ideas that, depending on how much of ourselves we put into them, seem either inspired or insignificant. It suddenly restored strength to him. The idea was that, whatever he might do, he could no longer escape death, and that, since he must, he might as well die bravely. And this is what he did.'' The Kafkaesque dealings with the bureaucracy, all laconically detailed, and the hero's inevitable death with its stunning but almost offhand epitaph make this a book of quiet but tremendous presence. A small masterpiece.

Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1991

ISBN: 0-910395-69-1

Page Count: 196

Publisher: Northwestern Univ.

Review Posted Online: April 11, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
HENRI DUCHEMIN AND HIS SHADOWS
by Emmanuel Bove ; translated by Alyson Waters

- BOOK REVIEW
NIGHT DEPARTURE and NO PLACE
by Emmanuel Bove

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STEPSON
by Emmanuel Bove

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.