While colonials and nationalists go on fiddling and proselytizing, V. S. Naipaul illuminates lite millennium which is here. He brings an uncompromising intelligence to a unique perspective on the world at large, as it is seen by the multiracial, multicultural children of Empire who as a consequence of their mixed heritage, are political orphans in perpetual exile. Guerrillas, half dream and half news story, outlines the ugly cracks in the ideological jigsaw of a Caribbean island just next door to Naipaul's native Trinidad—a state where "everybody wants to fight his own little war, everybody is a guerrilla." The novel's central encounter parodies our collective racist sexual fantasy as seen in exploitation films like Mandingo (a chief form of entertainment in this outpost of Naipaulia) by deliberately hybridizing it with the romance of Wuthering Heights. Thrushcross Grange is the name that Chinese half-breed leader Jimmy Armed has given to his back-to-the-land revolutionary commune where in fact young boys are reamed rather than reformed; the latest object of his perverse, ultimately bloody affections is the spoiled mistress of his chief supporter among the establishment, a man deported from South Africa for his activism. Jimmy finds his justification in Cathy's portrait of Heathcliff: "Your mother was an Indian princess and your father was the Emperor of China, we knew it all along"; for he more than anyone longs for the days of privilege and splendor. When the brawling, hungry slum that comprises this tiny republic explodes in flames bringing a swarm of U.S. helicopters, pettiness and power-lust also erupt down the length of the island as slaves and masters change partners. No easy answers for Naipaul: just "hints of the failure and shoddiness to come" in a social novel that will define for generations to come the terms of the devolution of Mistah Kurz's property.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0679731741
Page Count: 275
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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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