Atmospheric and exotic, but doesn’t add up to more than a series of pretty set pieces.
Australian Horniman’s second novel to appear here (after Mahalia, 2003) feels like a tender first: a lushly emotive, coming-of-age saga about a lesbian girl and her enigmatic half-sister.
In the tropical rain forest outside Sydney, in the hills behind Mullumbimby, sisters Laura and Lizzie Zambelli live a charmed, back-to-nature existence with their artist parents, Emma and Claudio, and little sister Chloe. Early on, Lizzie tells narrator Laura, she realized that they couldn’t have the same father: They look very different, and Claudio, a gregarious documentary filmmaker who “wanted more and more of life all the time,” seems cold to Lizzie. As the girls grow older, this impressionistic tale will show them acquiring many other secrets, especially the intoxicating charms of romantic love. When Emma’s girlhood friend and her odd daughter, Paris, come to stay, handsome Claudio is instantly smitten by the lean, blond, younger Stella. The inevitable rupture occurs: Claudio moves in with Stella and Paris, and secretive Emma loses the love of her life. In alternate chapters, Horniman portrays in wispy prose the story of Emma’s youthful friendship with Stella and her hip mother, Flora. They are neighbors to Emma’s eccentric Aunt Em, a spinster she first visits at age 16, when she begins to paint in earnest. Emma’s mother, father and sister all die in quick succession, leaving Emma to fend for herself. At the university in the early 1970s, she meets Claudio and loves him deeply; he begins to love her only after she becomes pregnant by another man. Other chapters pursue the dawning sexual awakening of both Lizzie, who grows gorgeously zaftig, and Laura, who realizes early on that she likes girls. There are several meandering novellas-in-a-novel here, and no real center as the point of view shifts.
Atmospheric and exotic, but doesn’t add up to more than a series of pretty set pieces.Pub Date: April 28, 2005
ISBN: 1-86508-837-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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.
