Bring on the violins: a hopelessly two-dimensional story rendered more so by its sentimentality.
Trinidadian-born Guy (The Sun, the Sea, and a Touch of the Wind, 1995, etc.) offers an excruciatingly atmospheric retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.
On a Caribbean island known as Jewel of the Antilles, the young orphan Désirée Dieu-Donné must struggle to find her way in a world that has no place set aside for her. Like just about everyone in her village, she works in the fields of Monsieur Galimar, the local grand homme who owns all the land nearby, but she dreams of greater things. One day she discovers another grand homme, the young Daniel Beauxhomme, half-dead on the road from a car crash, and she takes him home to nurse him back to health. Before he’s fully recovered, however, his wealthy father arrives and makes him return home. Daniel is still in bad shape, though, as is Désirée—who has fallen in love with him. Determined to find him, she sets off on a long journey to the grand seaside hotel owned by Daniel’s family. There, she discovers him, still teetering on the brink. Désirée knows a great deal about the secret charms and potions of the backwoods healers, however, and in no time at all she has restored him to health. Daniel’s family is grateful, and Daniel himself more than grateful: he’s fallen in love with Désirée. Soon she’s living in the hotel as his mistress, tended to by an army of beauticians, couturiers, and servants. But her happiness is short-lived: Daniel’s family expects him to marry, after all, and a peasant girl with no family or dowry doesn’t exactly fill the bill. A more suitable match is arranged with the daughter of Monsieur Galimar. Désirée is cast out, forced to watch her lover’s marriage from outside the church.
Bring on the violins: a hopelessly two-dimensional story rendered more so by its sentimentality.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56689-131-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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