An impressively savvy political novel that compares interestingly with Robert Stone's Damascus Gate (1998).
An increasingly suspenseful debut novel from the award-winning New Yorker writer (The Rainy Season, 1989) that spins a persuasively elaborate plot from a tragic "incident" at a Jerusalem checkpoint.
During a time of continuing terrorist attacks, Palestinian visitors to the new City are detained by Israeli officer-in-charge Lieutenant Ari Doron: among them are American-born Marina Hajimi, en route with her two-year-old son to visit her husband Hassan, a political prisoner. The asthmatic child, thus denied immediate medical treatment, dies in his mother's arms. The ensuing public outcry is exploited by Israeli and Palestinian spokesmen alike, and several other major characters soon enter the action. Marina's father George Raad, a Boston cardiologist and an Edward Said–like émigré intellectual, flies to his daughter's side in the country he had "abandoned"—and endures a disturbing reunion with his former boyhood friend, radical activist Ahmed Amr ("a wrong-headed Bedouin astride a fiery stallion, recklessly leading boys to their deaths"). The task of protecting the despised Doron (and of orchestrating much-needed damage control) brings in Israeli army veteran Colonel Daniel Yizhar, a wily political realist perfectly willing to use lies in service of "the truth." And the hunt for Doron, who in fact never attempts to hide, or claim he was "only following orders," engages Palestinian brothers Adnan and Mahmoud Sheukhi, the latter of whom burns to prove himself a devout nationalist. The story builds terrific tension as Wilentz draws her several subplots gradually together, and a series of staggered climaxes (including the consequences of Raad's physical and psychic failings, Doron's confused gestures toward expiation, and the fate of Marina's husband Hassan—freed by the Israelis, but unfree of the commitments that engulf him) underscores its bleak, unassailable central themes: that in this helplessly fragmented corner of the world, "everyone was an extremist because everyone wanted things simple" and that "Endings did not happen here."
An impressively savvy political novel that compares interestingly with Robert Stone's Damascus Gate (1998).Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85436-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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