So much fun to read that you may not notice how remarkably inventive and suggestive it is. Ríos is an authentic enchanter.
Another pun-derful literary extravaganza from the brilliant Spaniard making a name for himself as a contemporary equivalent of Joyce, Nabokov, and German experimentalist Arno Schmidt.
This time, Ríos takes a many-angled look at the career and psyche of eccentric artist Victor Mons (whose surname suggests both lofty eminence and pudendal earthiness). As the story begins, Mons is in the hospital, having landed there after a breakdown—one in which he impulsively destroyed a series of paintings he called his "Monstruary": images of the great monsters of antiquity and legend, literature and cinema, created to represent "the erotic scenes, models, lovers, and fetishes of his life and art." Mons's vacillations are observed and reported by acolytes and associates (as well as by himself). Most prominent of these is his cataloguer and friend Emil Alia, who also appeared in Larva (1990, not reviewed) and Loves That Bind (1998). What emerges from this babel of voices is a fragmented and funny portrait of the artist as both "monster" and genius-visionary, juxtaposed with crisp portrayals of such fetching characters as Mons's "night-errant model" and mistress, Eva Lalka, who adores the books of her Polish countryman Witold Gombrowicz; vaguely sinister "Joycentric" literary scholar Frank N. Reck; and Flaubert characters Bouvard and Pécuchet, now peddling their pseudointellectual wares on the Internet. It sounds forbidding but is actually very entertaining, thanks largely to the magnificent work of translator Grossman: a celebration—and appropriation—of lives and books (Henry James, Pierre Loti, Paul Cézanne, and Joyce himself are evoked here and there) that deftly illustrates the truth of Flaubert's dictum that "in literature nothing is really begun and nothing ended . . . everything is transformed and continued." And who but Ríos would think of using the image of the Gorgon in an ad for Gorgonzola cheese?
So much fun to read that you may not notice how remarkably inventive and suggestive it is. Ríos is an authentic enchanter.Pub Date: March 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40823-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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