Much of the time clumsy, but fiercely interesting.
Houellebecq, who writes in French and lives in Dublin, offers a second try (after Whatever, 1999) that’s said to be a hit abroad. Often pretentious—or flat-footed—it nevertheless holds the reader solidly with its guess about mankind’s biological future.
In the late 1950s, two brothers are born to the same hedonistic and socially rebellious mother, by different fathers; both of the boys (since none of the parents—all brilliant—is much interested in them) are raised by grandparents and, in the case of one, sent then to boarding school, where miseries are unspeakable as older boys torment and torture him. That’s Bruno, two years older than Michel, who, luckier than Bruno in living with a beloved grandmother, proves to be ultra brainy. The novel trudges on through the lives of these two brothers, Michel turning inward (seemingly more and more incapable of expressiveness or of love) and drifting toward becoming the molecular biologist who will later change humanity forever, and the ultra-sexed Bruno going through intensities of sexual experimentation that will end in madness. Least believable may be the descriptions of Bruno’s forays through the sex-camps and -clubs of France (“ ‘Sophie,’ he said with heartfelt emotion, ‘I’d like to lick your pussy’ ”), though contenders lie also in long unrealistic “conversations” on relevant topics (Huxley, utopianism) and in Houellebecq’s tendency toward the ungrounded pronouncement (“A subtle but definitive change had occurred in Western society during 1974 and 1975 . . .”). And yet, all this having been said, the working out of these lives does gain power and the sheer ambition of what Houellebecq is aiming for slowly becomes clear. Probing for the primal definitions of personality and emotion, he sets Michel to his work in molecular DNA discoveries—and introduces a narrator speaking to us from 2079 to explain the awesome and ironic revolution that’s been brought about.
Much of the time clumsy, but fiercely interesting.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40770-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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