An unusual, witty, provocatively anti-doctrinaire fable.
In an intentional utopian community on an island, a couple deals with the consequences of a sexual accusation.
“Having an affair with a student is never a good idea,” ruminates the character known only as Him in Italian author Raimo’s first novel to be published in the U.S. But, he continues, “it was statistically almost impossible not to.” This professor’s pregnant live-in girlfriend, known as Her, has been visited by a girl carrying a letter addressed to the man they have in common. It is an official accusation of repeated rape and sexual violence occurring two years ago, resulting in “TRAUMA no. 215.” The girl explains that she didn’t realize she was being abused at the time. The novel’s mockery of this situation is embedded in a larger sendup of politically correct culture and values, concentrated in an imaginary island called Miden. Created after “the Crash” in the unnamed home country of the protagonists (hint: they eat tiramisu and spaghetti), “the Crash had brought whole countries to their knees, whereas Miden emerged from the deep waters with the splendor of a Venus.” Miden is organized by Commissions, in which everyone must participate; both protagonists belong to Organic Pesticides. Diminutives and pet names have been outlawed to prevent women “from being harangued in an untoward or debasing way,” and since dressing in layers is required by law, most women wear “handmade raw wool sweaters in Miden colors.” When some audacious students print up white T-shirts with the slogan “WE’RE ALL PERPETRATORS,” these are soon joined by “WE ARE ALL TREES,” “WE ARE ALL OBLIQUE,” and “WE ARE ALL CHAIRS.” As the professor’s friends and associates submit questionnaires to be used at his trial, the couple suffers under the strain. A flowered orange poncho given her by a chromotherapist friend doesn’t help the pregnant woman, whose insomnia has become “almost ideological.” The verdict looms.
An unusual, witty, provocatively anti-doctrinaire fable.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4734-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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