Wolff’s book is smart, funny, and sad in turns, but the point it’s making—and it seems to be trying very hard to make a...
A burned manuscript occasions these tales from three distinct characters.
“You’ve never seen anyone,” Max’s ex-wife tells him. “You’ve only seen yourself, and the women you’ve had have only been mirrors in which you saw your own reflection.” This insight arrives near the end of Swedish author Wolff’s (Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs, 2016) second novel. It’s a strange, disjointed book. After Max completes a manuscript (which bears the same title as Wolff’s), he entrusts the only copy to literary critic Ruben, who has devoted his life to the study of Max’s work. But that turns out to be a risky place; Ellinor, a woman who met Ruben online and then moved into his house, finds the manuscript and lights it on fire. Lest this all sound too straightforward, keep in mind that the plot is told backward and, as it were, from the side: The novel is split into three sections, narrated by three different characters in reverse chronological order. It begins with Ellinor’s description of her own sexual history and continues in the second section with Max—a hateful character straight out of a Michel Houellebecq novel. In fact, Wolff seems to be parodying Houellebecq, or at least hanging him out to dry. But in an abrupt shift of mood and tone, the novel’s third section leaves Stockholm for Italy, and this is where the novel is at its most vivid. Lucrezia narrates here: Granddaughter of Rome’s very last marchesa, Lucrezia is responsible for her family’s crumbling estate—the place, as it happens, where Max wrote his ill-fated manuscript. Lucrezia describes the circumstances in which he wrote it. Whether any of this comes together in the end is anyone’s guess. Wolff’s prose is whip-smart and deliciously cynical about Max, Michel Houellebecq, and men like them—but you still have to spend a lot of time in their company.
Wolff’s book is smart, funny, and sad in turns, but the point it’s making—and it seems to be trying very hard to make a point—isn’t always in view.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-911508-44-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: & Other Stories
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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