Tortured beasts are tended by soul-destroyed keepers in an unstinting portrait of all that’s wrong with modern food...
Carnivores beware. Human and animal misery are evoked in unsparing detail in a dark saga of ruinous husbandry practices.
This first novel to appear in English from a prizewinning French author is not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. Brilliantly, lyrically descriptive whether evoking the natural world or a decaying farmstead, the book traces the terrible evolution of rural ways of life into cruelty and abuse via the history of one unhappy family. Opening in 1898, it evokes peasant existence in Gascony from the perspective of a harshly devout mother, a loving but ill father, and their daughter, Éléonore. Co-existing alongside their livestock, the trio endures a miserable cycle of poverty and endless labor. Marcel, a cousin, arrives to help with the work until World War I intervenes; Marcel survives but at the price of half his face and one eye. In spite of this, Éléonore loves him, marries him, and bears his son, Henri. Swooping forward to 1981, the smallholding has enlarged into a pig production unit, a place of pain and torment. The family has grown via Henri’s two sons to include a manic depressive mother, a mute grandson, alcoholism, sickness, and despair of multiple kinds. Meanwhile, outside, a herd of pigs is raised in grotesque, appalling conditions. Del Amo spares no details—indeed overloads the brutish accumulation—in this portrait of filth, cruelty, and moral decline. The people suffer, but the animals suffer more, whether in war- or peacetime. Overmedicated, inbred, and turned into industrial units, the pigs produce contaminated waste that fertilizes the fields that grow the grain they eat, creating a virtuous/vicious cycle of excrement and meat. The piggery has become a cradle of barbarism, and it isn’t going to end well.
Tortured beasts are tended by soul-destroyed keepers in an unstinting portrait of all that’s wrong with modern food production.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4757-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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