A book that attempts to walk the thin line between the trite and the profound—and sometimes succeeds.
Artist Marina Abramovic's marathon 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art becomes the focus of Rose’s tremblingly earnest novel, the Australian writer’s first novel for adults to be published in the U.S.
“This is not a story of potential,” announces the ominously angelic narrator who hovers over the novel, half muse and half ghost. “It is a story of convergence.” And so we meet Arky Levin, a noted composer of film scores, who has found himself unmoored after separating from his beloved wife. The circumstances are complicated: Incapacitated from a genetic condition, she has retreated to a home in the Hamptons, given their medical-student daughter power of attorney, and ordered Arky never to see her. It is in this state that he finds his way to MoMA, where Abramovi? is staging The Artist Is Present, for which she sits, still and in silence, as audience members take turns sitting across from her. There he meets Jane, a tourist and recent widow transfixed by the performance. She is not alone. There is Brittika, a Dutch graduate student writing her dissertation on Abramovic. There is Healayas, an art critic and old friend of Arky’s—once, she was the girlfriend of his longest-time collaborator, who betrayed them both. The performance is the gravitational pull of the novel, the point of convergence; no one emerges unchanged. Abramovic, too, is a character here: Large swathes of the book contend with her childhood and previous work, situating The Artist Is Present in her past. (Abramovic gave Rose permission to use her as a character.) It’s a bold proposition—Rose does not shy away from grappling with questions about the meaning and purpose of art—but too often, the answers to those questions tend to feel like platitudes about art and suffering. “Art will wake you up,” Abramovic’s childhood tutor announces. “Art will break your heart.” Art, Jane muses, offers “a kind of access to a universal wisdom.” The real power of the book, though, lies not in its philosophizing but in the unsteady tenderness between its characters.
A book that attempts to walk the thin line between the trite and the profound—and sometimes succeeds.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61620-852-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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