A disarming vision of one woman’s life in the underclass, though it takes time to come into focus.
A young woman’s journey from Africa to Berlin to locate her kidnapped son, as told by a chorus of voices.
The latest novel by Man Booker Prize–shortlisted New Zealand author Jones (Biografi, 1993, etc.) centers on Ines, who’s working as a hotel maid in Tunis when she falls for a German man. The two have a son, but the father quickly abducts the child and heads home to Berlin, prompting Ines to risk her life traveling from Tunisia to Sicily and through Europe to locate the boy and his father. The first portion of the novel is told by the people Ines met along the way, among them an Italian truck driver who demands sexual favors in return for ferrying her; an alpine hunter who helps her into Austria; an elderly blind man who hires her as a guide in Berlin; and, most prominently, an aquatic scientist with whom she cultivates the closest relationship. In time it becomes clear that the boy’s father is extorting Ines, making her pay for access to the child. But only later, when the narrative shifts to Ines’ own voice, does it becomes heartbreakingly clear how much Ines sacrificed beyond money for that access, and how willfully oblivious others have been to her emotions. Jones’ strategy of withholding Ines’ perspective for more than half the book is a little ungainly, and the characters' voices aren’t markedly distinct from each other—each speaks of Ines in a somber, sometimes pitying tone, and Ines’ voice is glum too. But the scenes between Ines and her son are affecting, showing connections that transcend their language barrier. Some color appears in the closing chapters, as she reveals the depth of her struggle, and the possibility of a hard-won happy ending appears.
A disarming vision of one woman’s life in the underclass, though it takes time to come into focus.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60819-699-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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