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HATE

A ROMANCE

Tracing the rise, fall and subsequent reinvention of a generation through a few key relationships, this deliberately...

Four Parisians navigate a shifting personal and political landscape in a modern, sexually liberated Europe.

Tracing the rise, fall and subsequent reinvention of a generation through a few key relationships, this deliberately provocative novel makes for a gossipy snapshot of the French intelligentsia. The narrator, Elizabeth “Liz” Levallois, is a chic pop-culture journalist who is conducting a longtime affair with Jean-Michel “Leibo” Leibowitz, a married Jewish intellectual best known for writing a book about fidelity. A one-time leftist, he finds himself, as the years go by, shifting to the right, taking on a contrarian’s role. Liz writes for the same newspaper as Leibo’s college pal Dominique Rossi, aka Doum, a local gay icon who came of age in the fabulous, anything-goes '80s. Liz fatefully introduces him to William Miller, aka Willie, a naïve younger man from the provinces. They fall in love, with Doum, who is HIV positive, taking the self-absorbed Willie under his wing. After the two split up, Doum, in the spirit of the times, takes a leadership role advocating for safe sex within the gay community. Willie, motivated by perversity, self-destruction and a twisted kind of love, consequently makes a name for himself as a defiant anti-safe sex ambassador. Preaching a subversive “no condoms” gospel, Willie becomes more and more obsessed with “destroying” his ex. Lacking Doum’s connections and coherence, he posts humiliating and pornographic photos of Doum on the Internet, and gets him marginalized in the gay-activist organization that he founded. But eventually, enough is enough, as Doum teams up with Leibo for a book and media tour that manages to make them both relevant again. Meanwhile, fading enfant terrible Willie spirals out of control–with disastrous results. That leaves a rueful Liz to pick up the pieces and question her choices. A sensation when it was first released in the author’s native France, Garcia’s debut is filled with multiple cultural touchstones and a “you had to have been there” insider quality that could put off some readers.Edgy, pretentious roman à clef.

Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-86547-911-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

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

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IF CATS DISAPPEARED FROM THE WORLD

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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