Written in 1952, Queer remained unprinted all these years, its publishers tell us, because of its "candid homosexual content, and. . .its author's own reluctance to make public the painful events it recounts." So now, in our latter-day age of liberation, we get to see it at last: a faded-trendy piece of 1950s hip arcana that preserves, if anything, a thin, petulant narcissism of feeling that might once upon a time have passed fleetingly for depth, however it may or may not be related to the development of the later Burroughs. Lee, American expatriate in Mexico City in the late 1940s, falls in love with the reluctant young Allerton, and, from the start, we're in for an affair that reads often now like one of the lesser forms of genre romance ("Lee watched the thin hands, the beautiful violet eyes, the flush of excitement on the boy's face"). As for feeling, we know it's deep, because the author says so, time and again, when Allerton holds back from Lee: "Lee was deeply hurt"; "Lee was depressed and shattered"; "He felt a deep hurt. . . Tears ran down his face." A ludicrous, comic-strip shorthand becomes more apparent in the narrative after Allerton agrees to serve as Lee's companion on a trip to South America, a trip that becomes a search for Yage, a thought-control drug: "'A Colombian scientist who lives in Bogota isolated Telepathine from Yage. We must find that scientist.'" Later, another clue takes them deep into the jungle: "'A botanist! What a break. He is our man. We will go tomorrow.'" What happens? The search for the drug is futile. Allerton drops Lee. Lee drifts back to Mexico City. Lee is cosmically sad. Burroughs explains in his introduction that all of this occurs while Lee is withdrawing from junk, and that's one reason (read the introduction to find out the other) why "a smog of menace and evil rises from the pages" of the book. It's a good thing he mentions the smog, so you'll be sure to notice it when you go back; what Burroughs doesn't do, though, is say much about why the book now reads so artificial, posed, thin, contrived, and silly, albeit with some effective travelogue footage. First printing of 30,000. Certainly more than enough.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1985
ISBN: 0143117831
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1985
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
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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