Rich, witty, outrageous fun: Canadian author Cumyn, in his US debut, is not afraid to go over the top for effect, but he is...
A riotous tale of sexual perversities in Ottawa and the afflictions of Job as they are visited upon a hapless middle-aged college professor.
If David Lodge had written the script for Glen or Glenda?, it might have turned out something like this. Begin with one Bob Sterling, a quiet family man and a teacher at the University of Ottawa who specializes in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Bob has an attractive and pleasant wife named Julia and a rollicking baby boy named Matthew. His mother-in-law Lenore is increasingly senile, but she’s being well looked-after in the Fallowfields Home. Bob drinks a bit more than he should, but his career seems assured and his life is pretty well under control—except for his one great, secret vice: Bob likes to wear women’s clothing. The only person who knows is Sienna Chu, a Chinese-Irish graduate student who travels with Bob to a Poe conference in New York and seduces him in his hotel room. No sooner has Bob found bliss with the domineering Sienna, however, than word arrives that his mother-in-law has escaped from Fallowfields. After she’s found wandering the streets of Ottawa, Julia decides Lenore needs to live with them for her own safety. This makes home life more than slightly unpleasant, and drives Bob even deeper into the clutches of Sienna—who, unfortunately, has a jealous boyfriend who vows revenge on Bob. Julia, meanwhile, finds herself the object of increasing attention from Donny Clatch, an old schoolmate who’s now renovating her bathroom. Just when it looks like all hell is going to break loose, the house burns down—set afire by the demented Lenore. Can a conflagration save a troubled family? Remember the story of the Phoenix?
Rich, witty, outrageous fun: Canadian author Cumyn, in his US debut, is not afraid to go over the top for effect, but he is patient and painstaking enough to bring off a coherent and well-thought-out storyline.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30691-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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