An unsentimental, heartwarming page-turner. Quite an achievement.
Lansens (Rush Home Road, 2002) overcomes the inherent “ick” factor in this surprisingly moving story of conjoined twins in a small Canadian community.
Ruby and Rose Darlen are joined side by side at the head. Rose, who tells most of the story, was born with a normal body but with her face pulled out of shape. Ruby’s face is lovely, but because her legs never fully formed, Rose must carry her. The twins have separate brains, separate personalities and interests. They even have separate jobs at the local library. As the novel opens, they are approaching their 30th birthday. Rose, who loves literature but passed up college because Ruby would not attend, has decided to write her own autobiography, offering to let Ruby compose her own chapters. Rose tells the dramatic story of their birth on the day a tornado touched down, of their mother who immediately abandoned them and of the saintly but colorful local nurse Lovey and her dashing but kindly husband Stash who adopted them. Although Rose often describes Ruby as a stereotypical “shallow pretty sister” (except most such sisters are not conjoined with misshapen bodies or heads), we gradually learn that Ruby is more than a pretty face and has in fact gathered a museum-quality collection of Indian artifacts. Rose leaves it to Ruby to mention the crucial fact that the sisters are dying from a brain tumor. Rose also has difficulty discussing the baby she conceived with a local boy who kissed Ruby’s lips while impregnating Rose’s body. Having given the baby up for adoption, Rose now yearns to find her. That bit of melodrama aside, the novel’s power lies in the wonderful narrative voices of Rose and Ruby. Lansens has created a richly nuanced, totally believable sibling relationship between two small-town girls in a community filled with lively haracters.
An unsentimental, heartwarming page-turner. Quite an achievement.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-06903-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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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