Likely to provoke squirms of embarrassment from readers who may well recall an old adage: never put anything in writing.
A collection of fiery break-up letters written by the rejected.
In the wake of an unpleasant split with her unable-to-commit boyfriend, freelance journalist Holmes decided to put her rage to good use and collect “the best and most famous break-up letters in history.” Hyperbole aside, the collection covers a wide range of letters, real and fictional, from Anne of Cleves’s 1540 note to King Henry VIII regarding their annulment to recklessly fired-off contemporary e-mail messages. The anthology is divided into straightforward sections that are captivating in a Jerry Springer sort of way, such as “The Tell-Off,” “The Other Woman/Other Man,” and “The ‘Dear John’.” Many of the contemporary pieces are remarkable for their deformed eloquence: “You are the spineless little prick of a maggot, eating it’s [sic] way through the shit of a diseased camel which is laying on the dirty, cracked cement floor of a small, poorly run zoo somewhere in small town America.” The compositions frequently clash: an elegantly cool letter by Anne Sexton (“You think you are a gentleman with your effect of polished clothes and mannerisms, but a true gentleman is one that has a kind and humble heart”) rests uneasily near a 51-point rant “from Lola to Ira” (“1. You have B.O. even after a shower”). The concept is slightly distasteful. To be sure, some of the authors wrote their letters with publication in mind, but what of the others? What of the letter Holmes found on the sidewalk and published without locating the writer? While the introduction notes that the break-up letter exists as a separate literary genre with its own rules and language, the text provides no analysis other than the loose chapter classifications. The fictional letters are generally the best written, while the contemporary pieces are notable for their anger and their distinct lack of cleverness and grace.
Likely to provoke squirms of embarrassment from readers who may well recall an old adage: never put anything in writing.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7867-1037-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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