Very cerebral and rather obvious.
From novelist (Harry Gold, 2000) and biographer Dillon (Paul Bowles, et al.): a spare psychoanalytical tale constructed much like a “serious art film,” with ambiguous scenes and loaded dialogue.
It’s circa 1960, and Lorle, a divorced mother, is in a car with her lover Edmund on an overnight trip to California’s gold country. Adoring Edmund, she can’t stop analyzing his every gesture, even as he avoids intense dialogue. When the car breaks down, they must leave it at a local garage and fly home. A man named Vern gives them a ride to the airport. Later, Vern invites Edmund to come pan for gold, but Edmund rebuffs him. Back in the city, Lorle sees a note on Edmund’s door signed “Love, Carol” and is inflamed with jealousy. Soon Edmund, who was previously Lorle’s analyst, breaks off with her and marries Carol because Carol offers him peace. He recommends a new analyst to Lorle, who grows emotionally stronger while Edmund weakens. When he visits Lorle, they make love but she gives him an ultimatum: not to visit again unless he calls by Saturday. Before the deadline, he has a fatal heart attack. Meanwhile, Vern, who, like Edmund, has not emotionally recovered from his WWII experiences, lives cut off from his past—in a cabin—until visited by his boyhood friend Neal. On a return visit to Neal in the city, he meets a woman who’s opening a resort in Mexico. His lonely life no longer satisfying, he looks up Lorle and invites her to Mexico. She accepts, though she’d refused to do the same with Edmund, fearing too much strangeness. In Mexico, Vern and Lorle find great sexual chemistry, he now obsessed with her the way she’d been with Edmund, she disengaged just as Edmund had been. Frustrated and angry, Vern storms out. Driving around, he saves some people in fire. When he returns, he and Lorle find a bittersweet peace and head home.
Very cerebral and rather obvious.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05216-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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