PICKING BONES FROM ASH

Name: PICKING BONES FROM ASH
Author: Marie Mutsuki Mockett
ISBN: 978-1-55597-541-8

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2009

Debut novelist Mockett’s portrayal of everyday life in Japan is engrossing, but the passivity of her protagonists belies her...

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A piano prodigy, daughter of a Japanese outcast, flees motherhood but can’t escape pursuit by her American offspring.

Akiko runs a bar in a country town in postwar Japan. Her daughter Satomi’s father is unknown but rumored to be a foreigner. That, and the bar’s popularity with the town’s men, causes the locals to shun mother and daughter. When Satomi wins a piano competition, Akiko marries a prosperous fisherman to finance her daughter’s musical education. While studying at a prestigious Tokyo conservatory, Satomi grows fond of a young man named Masayoshi. Fearing marriage will interfere with Satomi’s concert career, Akiko discourages Masayoshi from proposing. The disappointed suitor becomes a Buddhist monk and ultimately gets his own temple in Akita to the north. Satomi goes to Paris, where her musical zeal gives way to passion for Timothy, a rakish American antique importer and occasional smuggler. Helping Timothy scout artifacts in Japan, Satomi learns of her mother’s death. She attends Akiko’s obsequies at Masayoshi’s temple, where, not entirely by chance, she encounters Francois, another crooked Asian antique purveyor. Timothy is arrested in Tokyo and imprisoned. Disowned by her stepfamily, Satomi has no choice but to accompany Francois to California, where she’s exploited as his underpaid antique authenticator and mistress. When Satomi gives birth to Rumi, she feels trapped and, on impulse, walks away from San Francisco and her infant. Francois raises Rumi, who soon evinces a collector’s clairvoyance: objects tell her whether they’re genuine or fake. She’s haunted by the haggard ghost of a woman she assumes is the mother Francois has told her is dead. When Rumi discovers a morbid maternal memento secreted with Francois’ hot merchandise, she heads for Japan, where Masayoshi holds the key to Satomi’s whereabouts.

Debut novelist Mockett’s portrayal of everyday life in Japan is engrossing, but the passivity of her protagonists belies her intent to demonstrate how talented women defy domestic constraints.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-1-55597-541-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Graywolf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TREE DOCTOR
by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICAN HARVEST
by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

- BOOK REVIEW
WHERE THE DEAD PAUSE, AND THE JAPANESE SAY GOODBYE
by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.