A flawed attempt to illuminate an extraordinary historical moment; the fumbling translation is no help.
The Chilean author (The Dancer and the Thief, 2008, etc.) uses two perspectives for this skimpy take on the twilight of the Pinochet dictatorship.
In 1973, Gen. Pinochet seized power in Chile and began a reign of terror. Fifteen years later, the population is cowed and apathetic; there are still 3,000 missing detainees. Make that 3,001, for the novel begins with the arrest of professor Santos, philosophy teacher at Santiago’s most prestigious high school. His son Nico and his classmates watch helplessly as he’s taken from the classroom. Meanwhile, Adrián Bettini, father of Nico’s girlfriend, Patricia, is summoned by Fernández, the Interior minister. Bettini has reason to be fearful; he has been blacklisted, jailed and tortured. Today will be different. Pinochet has decided to hold an above-board referendum with a simple question: Do you want him to stay in office? A “no” vote will lead to a multiparty election. (All this is historically accurate.) Fernández invites Bettini, once Chile’s best ad man, to head the “yes” ad campaign. Bettini declines; he will work for the “no” campaign that’s been granted 15 minutes on state-run television. Fifteen minutes against 15 years; it’s a challenge, just as it’s a challenge for Nico to find his father. Skármeta flips between the two stories as he struggles to decide whether to emphasize the continuing horrors of Pinochet’s rule or the glimmer of light of the “no” campaign. After Nico is shown the dead body of his beloved English teacher, a leftist, his throat cut, the author switches to the zany antics of the “no” campaign. Whether it’s the catchy jingle or the rainbow logo, the “no” campaign prevails, the citizenry rejoices, and Santos is freed after strings are pulled. For Nico and Patricia, it’s a triple: the end of virginity, of high school and of the dictatorship.
A flawed attempt to illuminate an extraordinary historical moment; the fumbling translation is no help.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59051-627-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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