Davis's third (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, 1993) is a tour de force made up of the surreal and the poetic, of skillful shifts in voices, settings, and eras—but, under the pyrotechnics, with a nagging sense of there being primarily the familiar and well trodden. An unnamed 1950s family lives in a place first called ``the town of X'' but seeming later on to be suburban Philadelphia. In one of the rooms of this outwardly proper and well-manicured house- -it's got in it mother, father, two sisters, pet dachshund, and mice—is a dollhouse handed down from another generation: and as Davis's narrative unfolds, readers are treated to the mystery, humor, and irony of its being the dollhouse family rather than the ``real'' family who do the walking, talking, thinking, feeling, and reacting. Along with the versus dolls parallel is another, this one created by now and then: Nearby, in the 1860s, lived one Edwina Moss (the 1950s father's name is Edwin), who, like the later family, had not only a dog but also a daughter who fell ill, rejected food—and may have been mystic. What happens? Well, in both past and present, there's a huge storm, a sick daughter, and, in one way or another, a missing father (the Civil War being the cause in one case, work, temperament, and a stroke in the other). In the later tale, the anorexic daughter—Dorothy—loses her odd friend Joy to death in the hurricane, and learns about anti- Semitism when eccentric neighbor Benny Gold is (or is he?) accused of her murder. It's not always easy to tell what happened or just might have happened, though often enough there's involvement and charm amid the gloom—as when one of the house mice declares of the 1950s family that ``The mother was a drinker, the father a gust of wind.'' Brilliant, accomplished, capable, at times even moving—but with the air of an exercise about it for all that. *justify no* Davis's third (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, 1993) is a tour de force made up of the surreal and the poetic, of skillful shifts in voices, settings, and eras—but, under the pyrotechnics, with a nagging sense of there being primarily the familiar and well trodden. An unnamed 1950s family lives in a place first called ``the town of X'' but seeming later on to be suburban Philadelphia. In one of the rooms of this outwardly proper and well-manicured house- -it's got in it mother, father, two sisters, pet dachshund, and mice—is a dollhouse handed down from another generation: and as Davis's narrative unfolds, readers are treated to the mystery, humor, and irony of its being the dollhouse family rather than the ``real'' family who do the walking, talking, thinking, feeling, and reacting. Along with the versus dolls parallel is another, this one created by now and then: Nearby, in the 1860s, lived one Edwina Moss (the 1950s father's name is Edwin), who, like the later family, had not only a dog but also a daughter who fell ill, rejected food—and may have been mystic. What happens? Well, in both past and present, there's a huge storm, a sick daughter, and, in one way or another, a missing father (the Civil War being the cause in one case, work, temperament, and a stroke in the other). In the later tale, the anorexic daughter—Dorothy—loses her odd friend Joy to death in the hurricane, and learns about anti- Semitism when eccentric neighbor Benny Gold is (or is he?) accused of her murder. It's not always easy to tell what happened or just might have happened, though often enough there's involvement and charm amid the gloom—as when one of the house mice declares of the 1950s family that ``The mother was a drinker, the father a gust of wind.'' Brilliant, accomplished, capable, at times even moving—but with the air of an exercise about it f
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-88001-560-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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