Written with care and real affection for its characters, fictional and historical.
Though half-French, Roberts offers a distinctly British fiction—stoically understated and as concerned with passion for literature as with passion for people—about two sisters competing for one man’s love.
Actually, Roberts (The Looking Glass, 2001, etc.) is writing about two sets of sisters: The story is interlaced with supposedly unmailed letters from Charlotte Brontë to her former teacher in Brussels. Charlotte’s unrequited love for M. Heger, as well as her allusions to Heger’s possible preference for her sister Emily, mirror much of the contemporary story of Catherine and Vinny. Catherine, a professor with domestic instincts along the lines of Mrs. Dalloway, secretly writes women’s erotica—soft porn—to support her weakness for comfort and finery (the brief scene in which she gets an expensive haircut is worth the price of the book for its sensual portrayal of middle-aged womanhood). Catherine has been married for many years to Adam, a respected novelist working as a carpenter, supposedly to research a novel. Their children grown, Catherine and Adam have just moved into the small house Adam’s artist father has bequeathed to them. To their housewarming come Charlie, whose gallery Adam is building, and Vinny, Catherine’s more bohemian sister, a poet whose favorite novel is Jane Eyre. Sexual undercurrents run between Adam and Vinny as well as between Catherine and Charlie. All end up in the bedroom looking at Robert’s best painting—for which Catherine was the model. It turns out that Vinny and Adam were a couple back in their 20s. At loose ends, Catherine accompanied them to Robert’s studio in France and ended up with Adam (maybe Robert too). Now it turns out that Vinny still loves Adam, who in turn is distraught over his discovery of Catherine’s secret career but even more over his own secret: writer’s block. As all sort out their feelings and memories, the plot meanders toward its purposely-inconclusive ending.
Written with care and real affection for its characters, fictional and historical.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-7440-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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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