Elegantly written family epic that brings to mind Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy.
A wealthy Muslim family in 1950s Sudan must deal with the challenges—and opportunities—of a changing world.
Director of a successful trading company, Mahmoud Abuzeid has an enviable, if complicated life. With two wives and four children, he straddles two worlds, insulated by his money and influence. His first wife Hajjah Waheeba is a traditional—and illiterate—Sudanese woman who is happy to remain in the family compound. Nabilah, his much-younger Egyptian-born second wife, yearns for the cosmopolitan attractions of her native Cairo. Her sophistication and intelligence represent the future to Mahmoud, who prefers her company. Waheeba’s son Nur, the family heir-apparent, has progressive tendencies like his father, although he is happily betrothed to his teenage cousin Soraya. The two are sweetly in love, but their future looks bleak after Nur is paralyzed during a swimming accident. Reluctant to bind his niece to an invalid, Mahmoud insists they break it off. Soraya, who continues to have feelings for Nur, throws herself into her studies, even enrolling in medical school. But eventually she agrees to marry Nur’s best friend Tuf Tuf. The news breaks Nur’s heart but ignites his creativity, leading him to become an in-demand poet and lyricist for popular musicians—a move which rankles the more conservative family members. Meanwhile, tensions between the two wives reach the breaking point when Waheeba arranges a secret circumcision for Nabilah’s six-year-old daughter Ferial, a custom Nabilah (and Mahmoud) find barbaric. This subsequently drives a wedge between Mahmoud and both his women, as he struggles to do the right thing for his family, especially Nur, who depends on the care of his mother. And all of this unfolds as Sudan struggles for independence from Britain. Rich in detail and generous in spirit toward its complex characters, this concise follow-up to The Translator (2006) showcases Aboulela’s talent for connecting political and personal upheaval.
Elegantly written family epic that brings to mind Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1951-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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