The Chinese Central Propaganda Bureau banned the book in China because it “slanders Mao Zedong…and is overflowing with sex”:...
Satirical novel of love during the Cultural Revolution.
“Serve the people,” a slogan taken from a speech Mao Zedong gave in 1944, plays a paradoxical role in the life of Wu Dawang, an orderly assigned to garden and cook for the Party’s Division Commander in 1967. It’s emblazoned on a sign that decorates the Division Commander’s dinner table, defining the path to advancement in the People’s Liberation Army and in the Party. But then the Division Commander’s wife, Liu Lian, tells Wu Dawang that whenever the sign has been moved from its usual place, he is to stop performing his usual duties and attend to her very specific, very personal needs upstairs. Wu Dawang knows that Liu Lian has the power to destroy his hopes for advancement, and he has also been told—again and again—that to serve the Division Commander and his family is to serve the people. Nor is he unaware that Liu Lian is gorgeous, glamorous and passionate in ways that his peasant wife is not. So naturally, Wu Dawang decides to serve the people by serving Liu Lian. Their affair comes to a terrible end, but before it does the lovers indulge in an orgy that allows them to express long-suppressed physical and emotional needs, including the need to exorcise the exigencies of class in a society where inequality does not officially exist. Lianke’s protagonists bring their debauchery to a climax in a contest to determine which is the greater counterrevolutionary: They rampage through the Division Commander’s house destroying all the Mao-emblazoned furnishings, crockery, cookware and decorative bric-a-brac they can find. There’s no reason to believe, however, that love can triumph over the Party.
The Chinese Central Propaganda Bureau banned the book in China because it “slanders Mao Zedong…and is overflowing with sex”: You couldn’t ask for a better blurb than that.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8021-7044-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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
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