An informed but flawed work that explores the impact of an English town on Woolf.
A debut literary/historical study examines the 10 years Virginia Woolf spent in Richmond.
Woolf, the English writer and pioneer of modernism, lived in Richmond, a town southwest of London, between 1914 and 1924. In the summer of 1913, she had suffered a serious breakdown, which led to a failed suicide attempt. The strains of writing her first novel, combined with the pressures of living in busy central London, had taken a serious toll. Woolf’s husband, Leonard, wanted to relocate to somewhere quieter, where his wife could convalesce. The couple moved to lodging in Richmond in October 1914, before falling in love with Hogarth House, which they would acquire a lease for the following year. Drawing on extracts from Woolf’s diaries, the study broadly assesses her time in Richmond, and how the town influenced her—from her walks in the parks and woods to the arrival of the couple’s first printing press. Fullagar also considers key developments in Woolf’s career during this period, notably the founding of the Hogarth Press, which allowed her to publish her own works without having “to suffer the negativity of sending manuscripts to publishers for scrutiny.” He deftly shows readers Richmond through Woolf’s eyes by handpicking pertinent excerpts from her diaries. In one vivid entry, she notes: “We walked in Richmond Park this afternoon; the trees all black, and the sky heavy over London; but there is enough colour to make it even lovelier today than on bright days, I think.” Fullagar is keen to allow Woolf’s writing to take center stage, adding discreet, if occasionally prosaic, commentary: “Even when the weather was not very attractive, Virginia would walk around the Richmond area and still find beauty.” But the book can become repetitive; for instance, Fullagar includes a diary excerpt in chapter one where Woolf expresses a desire to buy a “bulldog called John.” This information resurfaces in the following chapter. Repetitions also arise regarding a typesetting mix-up that confused “the h’s with the n’s.” While Fullagar’s tight focus on Richmond makes this study of Woolf a compelling proposition, the argument lacks order. And his own critical voice is often lost among the many sizable hunks of text carved from Woolf’s diaries.
An informed but flawed work that explores the impact of an English town on Woolf.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-912430-03-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Aurora Metro Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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