The author provides insight into the psyche of cult members, but it’s still puzzling why any person would blindly follow...
A mother and daughter seek to escape a commune headed by an autocratic preacher in D’Aguiar’s (The Longest Memory, 1995, etc.) evocative novel, based on tragic events that occurred in 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana.
They’ve surrendered their birth certificates, their worldly possessions and their free wills to follow a charismatic leader to an exotic location in the midst of a jungle. But their 3,000 acre commune is far from the utopia some devotees envisioned. Instead, members endure beatings and theatrical tests of faith, including ones that involve absolute trust while scorpions or tarantulas skitter up and down their arms. The preacher often uses fear and deceptive, “miraculous” resurrections to maintain a firm grip on a community that includes Joyce, her 10-year-old daughter, Trina, and a caged gorilla named Adam, whose thoughts and actions provide a unique perspective to D’Aguiar’s narrative. Much as the preacher’s praise and special attention ensure cooperation and adoration from his adherents, fruit and back scratches guarantee the gorilla’s loyalty, at least for a time. But not all who live within the commune remain complacent. Some are labeled dissidents, and others, like Trina’s friend Ryan, try to run away or go into hiding. Joyce holds a trusted position keeping the commune’s books in order and makes occasional boat trips to the mainland office, where money often changes hands with local officials. She and the boat’s captain develop an attraction, and he entertains Trina with stories about a spirited spider named Anansi while he verbally spars with Joyce when she defends the commune and invites him to join. When the preacher increasingly begins to single out Trina, Joyce and her daughter plan their escape from a community so enthralled with his promises they dutifully practice when he instructs them to rehearse the ultimate act. Joyce insists that they limit their plan of escape to themselves, but Trina has a change of heart. D’Aguiar’s narrative adequately describes the brutality and manipulative efforts of a self-absorbed leader, and his depiction of Adam and the infusion of magical realism add an unusual and sympathetic aspect to the story.
The author provides insight into the psyche of cult members, but it’s still puzzling why any person would blindly follow such destructive directives.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-227732-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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