A richly layered, difficult text that may well be worth the several readings it probably requires.
An inordinately ambitious first novel, the work of a Westerner living in Japan, traces a chain of events that affect lives on several continents, explored in stories “ghostwritten” by other (in some cases, literally alien) intelligences than those of the people who experience them.
The narrative begins and ends (in “Okinawa,” then “Underground”) in the mind of a member of a millennial cult that commits mass murder by releasing poison gas into the Tokyo subway system. An errant phone call links him with a Korean-born music-store clerk working in “Tokyo” who’s smitten with a beautiful student, and follows her to “Hong Kong.” There, the couple are glancingly observed by a British finance lawyer who’s cast off by his resentful (childless) wife, sexually dominated by their Chinese maid, drawn into money-laundering for a Russian criminal conspiracy, and haunted by the unthreatening ghost of a young Oriental girl. Similarly accidental connections lead gradually from East to West, focusing on a series of art thefts that occur in “Petersburg,” a rootless jazz drummer’s sexual and artistic progress (as a ghostwriter of celebrity autobiographies) through London’s musical and political worlds, and a woman scientist’s painful exile from her past as part of a surveillance team performing secretive services—on an island off the coast of Ireland—for the US Department of Defense. This is a fairly extreme example of the contemporary “systems novel” (as practiced by Pynchon, DeLillo, McElroy, et al.) obsessed with the interrelationship—not to mention intricacy and opacity—of postindustrial culture’s supersophisticated technologies. The impression of a world systematically endangering itself lies heavily on every page. Hollander’s bleak black-comic dramatizations of the depersonalizing effects of a global village worshipping such strange new gods doesn’t entirely escape redundancy and obscurity, but the most interesting chapters, especially those depicting a Chinese woman victimized by Mao’s Cultural Revolution and a Mongolian spirit vainly seeking a stable “host” body, rise to impressive levels of both ingenuity and poignancy.
A richly layered, difficult text that may well be worth the several readings it probably requires.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-46304-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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