Delicate handling of deep themes—loss, missed connections, meaninglessness—gives the novel an emotional charge greater than...
A French journalist and a Portuguese photographer find they have some uncomfortable things in common in this latest from Le Tellier (Enough About Love, 2011, etc.).
Narrator Vincent Balmer has relocated to Lisbon to escape from his fruitless love for flirtatious, withholding Irene. When he agrees to cover the trial of serial killer Ricardo Pinheiro with photographer Antonio Flores, he doesn’t know that Antonio is having an affair with Irene. When he finds out, he determines to get his revenge by tracking down Duck, the childhood sweetheart Antonio still pines for; then Irene will know what it feels like to be rejected. This mildly distasteful premise is mostly an excuse for Le Tellier’s atmospheric, leisurely narrative of nine days in 1985, which mingles Vincent’s search for Duck, the first day of the trial and his wanderings through Lisbon with Antonio and Irene—who arrives from Paris and is not pleased to find Vincent supposedly involved with someone else. He’s faking this romance, aided by a woman he meets at a cafe. Another very young woman met by chance gives Antonio a taste of the hopeless love Irene and Vincent have both experienced, providing more satisfactory payback than Vincent’s eventual discovery of Duck. Unfolding memories give readers a better understanding of and sympathy for Vincent, who has endured a difficult childhood, his mother’s death and a fraught relationship with his father, who recently committed suicide. Intermittent excerpts from Portuguese writer Jaime Montestrela’s Contos acquosas, which Vincent is translating, amplify the novel’s tone of existential unease, which is also buttressed by glancing references to the Salazar dictatorship and Vincent’s memories of a journey to the Okavango Delta in Africa, “a metaphor for unfinished business, for adversity, for an unreachable goal.” It makes an allusive kind of sense that he names his novel after a Lisbon tramline that no longer exists.
Delicate handling of deep themes—loss, missed connections, meaninglessness—gives the novel an emotional charge greater than its low-key particulars and pacing.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59051-533-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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