Excessive, redundant, chaotic, and absolutely necessary. And if Fifo ever gets hold of a copy, he’ll be swallowing his...
Fourth volume of the late (1943–90) Cuban writer’s semiautobiographical “pentagony” (Arenas’s word), written in 1991 as part of a five-volume sequence (The Palace of White Skunks, 1990, etc.).
The rambling, free-form fantasy begins—smashingly—with a 50-page verse play, “The Flight of Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda.” The premise of this hilariously obscene set piece is the attempted escape to Miami of its eponymous heroine, a politically suspect poet, from the clutches of an island dictator named “Fifo”—who’s celebrating the 40th anniversary of his reign (declared the 50th, because that “round number” pleases the vainglorious tyrant). Fifo orders all his late political enemies recalled to life (for publicity purposes, but also for the pleasure of murdering them again)—and Arenas is off to the races: sketching the literary and (homo)sexual adventures of several locally famous “queens” and also his own several alter egos (Gabriel, “Skunk in a Funk,” et al); tossing off miscellaneous metafictional inventions (“Pensées,” “Tongue-Twisters,” interpolated satirical broadsides); reinventing traditional structure (the novel’s Foreword appears in its midsection)—all the while subjecting Fifo’s megalomaniacal posturing to elegant and devastating abuse. Examples: upon being informed that California apples can’t be grown on his island, Fifo declares this agricultural injustice is another illustration of capitalist aggression; a specially bred “Bloodthirsty Shark” patrols nearby waters, sniffing out would-be emigrants; a saint (Nelly) reputed to have been gay is marked for “decanonization”; the assassinations of rival heads of state are accomplished via anal intercourse, with that ultimate sexual weapon, “The Electric Venus”: on and on the scurrilous merriment goes. Yet beneath the grotesqueries, it’s plaintively clear that the story offers (as do all Arenas’s books, in some measure) “a detailed history of the horrors to which queer men of all stripes . . . [have] been subjected” through the ages, and especially in Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Excessive, redundant, chaotic, and absolutely necessary. And if Fifo ever gets hold of a copy, he’ll be swallowing his cigars.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-84065-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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