A short, bleak, capably written book, ironically titled, icy cold to the core.
Prizewinning Norwegian Ørstavik (The Blue Room, 2014, etc.) follows the parallel courses of a single mother and her 8-year-old son during a night that moves unrelentingly toward tragedy.
Vibeke and her son, Jon, have recently relocated to a small town in northern Norway. Vibeke's mind is on a brown-eyed engineer at her new job. Jon is hoping for a train set for his birthday the next day and looking forward to the cake he imagines his mother making. A thoughtful boy, he has a way of blinking that annoys her and is concerned about torture victims around the world. "Dearest Jon," his mother calls him at dinner, but to herself she thinks, "Can't you just go...find something to do, play or something?" She remembers a dream that began at a glamorous party where a man admired her but ended in the "stench of urine," in "a wasteground of asphalt and ice." While she showers, Jon goes out into the wintry night to sell raffle tickets for the local sports center. He makes a friend and, dozing at her house later, also dreams: he and his mother return to their previous home and find it vandalized, his father at the table eating all their food and telling "sad stories about his life." A nightmarish sense of impending doom hangs over these carefully detailed, tightly controlled pages. Vibeke, thinking her son asleep in his room, also goes out. She has forgotten all about his birthday and goes bar hopping with a traveling carnival worker she meets. Her story and Jon's are told breathlessly close together, without page breaks, almost overlapping. When Jon returns from town, the house is locked, the car gone. It is at this point after 11 p.m.. Not once has it occurred to Vibeke to put her child to bed or even say good night to him. (Though this is clearly essential to the plot, it perhaps strains credulity.) She must have needed something for his birthday cake, he tells himself, and accepts a ride from a stranger in order to stay warm. "Aren't boys your age supposed to be in bed by now?" the driver asks. But it isn't creepy locals who pose the greatest threat or torture victims Jon should be worrying about.
A short, bleak, capably written book, ironically titled, icy cold to the core.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-914671-94-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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