Next book

ORIGINAL PRIN

A lively complement to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, and other...

Canadian academic and novelist Boyagoda (Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square, 2015, etc.) skewers the corporatized university and modern-world politics alike in this delicious satire.

Princely St. John Umbiligoda teaches English at a college once called Holy Family College until the faculty “expressed concern that the school was becoming increasingly irrelevant and too Catholic-seeming,” whereupon it became the University of the Family Universal, or UFU. (Say the initials aloud.) That didn’t help the fiscal situation, and the school is now teetering on bankruptcy. That’s just the beginning of Prin’s troubles. He’s not particularly happily married, he’s not well-paid, his work as a specialist in “marine life in the Canadian literary landscape” isn’t setting the world on fire, and though only 40 he’s battling prostate cancer. When a Chinese developer called The Nephew comes along with a plan to bail out the school, it’s to make himself a fortune by leveraging the resources of a faraway Middle Eastern nation called Dragomans: UFU will become a retirement home for the well-to-do, and its Dragomans branch will train students to become caretakers with “diplomas…in Eldercare Studies,” as Prin’s girlfriend, who’s in on the deal, reveals, with the students then coming to Toronto “for internships at the condominium The Nephew is going to build on your campus." Teaching The English Patient far from home has its attractions, and so does that erstwhile girlfriend, but politics complicates the picture—politics academic and worldly, and economics, and sex, and culture clashes, and good old-fashioned terrorism. Boyagoda’s novel careens to an untidy, violent end with plenty of unresolved questions, which makes it a good thing that it’s supposed to be the first installment of a trilogy. Messy though it may be, it’s a lot of fun—and you can’t help but read on when opening a book that begins, “Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family.”

A lively complement to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, and other academic sendups.

Pub Date: May 7, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-77196-245-2

Page Count: 299

Publisher: Biblioasis

Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 11


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 11


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • New York Times Bestseller

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:

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 34


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2018


  • New York Times Bestseller

Next book

CIRCE

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 34


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2018


  • New York Times Bestseller

A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.

“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.

Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.

Pub Date: April 10, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018

Close Quickview