A satirical masterpiece, very funny for all its footnotes. You can bet the authorities in Beijing are scratching their heads...
Sprawling, sometimes goofy, always seditious novel of modern life in the remotest corner of China.
Set Rabelais down in the mountains of, say, Xinjiang, mix in some Günter Grass, Thomas Pynchon and Gabriel García Márquez, and you’re in the approximate territory of Lianke’s (Serve the People! 2008, etc.) latest exercise in épateringthe powers that be. Oh, and then there’s Friedrich Dürrenmatt, too, whose The Visit afforded the lesson that you should never mess with little people in the high country. Deep inside the Balou Mountains, Lianke imagines, lies a Macondo-like village inhabited by a great heroine of the Long March, broken of leg and frostbitten of toe, along with her cohort of—well, let one of them tell it: “thirty-five blind people, forty-seven deaf people, and thirty-seven cripples, together with several dozen more who are missing an arm or a finger, have an extra finger, stunted growth, or some other handicap.” These odd folks would seem an impediment to the grand plans of the local Communist leadership, smitten by dreams of revolutionary capitalism, who have a grand plan even for the hamlet of Liven, a place that prompts one of them, Chief Liu, to complain, “Fuck, I simply can’t believe it could possibly get too cold for me.” Cold is the least of his concerns in fulfilling his dream, which is to promote tourism and investment in order to turn the mountains into a Red Disneyland featuring the embalmed corpse of V.I. Lenin himself, to be bought from an ungrateful Russia and turned into a tourist attraction. Needless to say, the bureaucrats’ plans get turned on their heads, and the Cloud Cuckoo-Land that emerges isn’t quite what they bargained for. Lianke writes long, but there’s not a wasted word or scene. And who can resist a book with characters with names the likes of Grandma Mao Zhi, Little Polio Boy and One-Legged Monkey?
A satirical masterpiece, very funny for all its footnotes. You can bet the authorities in Beijing are scratching their heads about it.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2037-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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 story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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