Overlong and a touch undisciplined but rewarding.
Debut novel, set in working-class France, by British writer and translator Woodall.
Don’t ask what they make in the plastics factory down by the center of a nondescript French town. The answer might be discomfiting, what with specifications of “conjugation of uncommon length with uncommon slenderess” and the requirement of “a threefold ablutionary regime.” The mostly immigrant laborers who work there for one Gérard Boucan, “factory owner, faithless husband, and bewildered father to a wayward son,” do so mostly because doing so keeps them fed—but also because it affords them a tiny toehold on the French dream, at least as it played out in the waning years of the Giscard d’Estaing regime. Then, the story suggests, it was at least possible for people from every corner of the French sphere, from the Indian Ocean and the Mahgreb and Afrique Noir, to come together without wishing to kill one another—indeed, often with quite the opposite intent, to judge by all the coupling and decoupling that goes on here. Woodall’s is less a novel of ideas than of attitudes, each character exploring his—almost all are male—ideas of what the Other constitutes. The sometimes-threatening, sometimes-miscreant Portuguese immigrant Fernando is astonished to learn that it is possible to be African and not criminal: “What’s wrong with you?” he asks Alphonse. “You don’t smoke, you keep out of trouble, you don’t drink, I bet you don’t even fuck.” Fernando, Rachid, Philippe, Salvatore, and the others on the floor more than make up for all that. Yet, though it would be simple for Woodall to reduce his characters to stereotypes, he resists abstraction; as each collides with the next, they come away changed a little. Talky between spasms of action, the novel—whose sequel is in process—is reminiscent at points of Jean Eustache’s 1973 film The Mother and the Whore: complex, deep, and seemingly unending.
Overlong and a touch undisciplined but rewarding.Pub Date: March 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62897-111-8
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
