A moving chronicle of hope triumphing over despair from the author of The Match (2008, etc.).
An episodic novel—or a set of loosely connected stories—set in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the 26-year civil war between the insurgent Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan army.
The narrator is a van driver, Vasantha, a conceit that cleverly allows the reader to accompany him on his travels through the country, so the structure of the novel becomes an odyssey of sorts. Early on Vasantha comments: “You don’t have to feel trapped. If you are on the move, there is always hope,” and he does in fact retain his humanity and optimism despite the postwar devastation he chronicles. We get to know him through his thoughts and his conversations in the van and at meals, frequently with foreigners visiting the country as it tries to regain a foothold on tourism. One encounter that leads to a rather testy confrontation occurs among Father Perera, his friend Mr. Patrick (an Englishman who’s studying for the priesthood) and a major from the Sri Lankan army who recounts a harrowing episode from the war, one that could be construed as a war crime but which the major simply dismisses as a necessary action. The brutality of the anecdote plays out as they’re all eating a meal that includes the most delicious mangoes in the country. In “Shoot,” Sanji, a photographer who’s been an expat in Italy for many years, returns for a photo shoot at a cricket stadium that had been destroyed by a tsunami in 2004. Other signs of hope abound as, toward the end of his travels, Vasantha recounts streets swept clean of war debris, burned-out buses that have been hauled away and oil barrels removed from army checkpoints, yet many of the scars remain because they’ve been internalized by those traumatized by a generation of war.
A moving chronicle of hope triumphing over despair from the author of The Match (2008, etc.).Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62097-020-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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