Essential, as ever, for students and budding practitioners of the short story form.
The venerable annual honors volume approaches its centenary but shows no signs of tiring out.
There are few surprises but plenty of pleasures in the latest installment of the O. Henry Award anthology, in recent years edited by novelist and short story writer Furman. One pleasant surprise is that, finally, no one is trying to write like Raymond Chandler—or David Foster Wallace, for that matter. Another is that no matter how vignette-ish, most of the stories here entertain large ideas. There is refreshing attention to work by writers of South Asian origin, among them California-born Shruti Swamy, who writes affectingly of a single moment, full of symbolic portent, in which a dog confronts a cobra: “There is a depth that dogs’ eyes have,” she writes, “which snakes’ eyes lack. Snakes’ eyes are flat and uncompromising, and reveal no animating intelligence. Perhaps that’s why we never trust them.” As do so many others, the story ends on a sententious note, in the literal sense: “What you have left is what you have.” Indeed. Martha Cooley’s “Mercedes Benz” blends high-end cars, Janis Joplin, and visions of the Italian countryside arresting enough to make the reader book a flight to Rome, while Gerard Woodward’s existentialist-tinged “The Family Whistle” relates a story of assumed identity that might have been a footnote to The Return of Martin Guerre. “You wouldn’t believe the stories of his life then,” says one character of the presumed con artist. “They amused me while we were in the camp, but only in the way that men together will be amused by such stories—in the real world they would have disgusted me.” The strongest in the volume is Amit Majmudar’s “Secret Lives of the Detainees,” straight from the headlines, in which poetry defeats even the best-armed imperial force in the end; how real-world that scenario is may be debatable, but there’s no arguing the beauty of the writing.
Essential, as ever, for students and budding practitioners of the short story form.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-43250-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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