A fierce and evocative telling of the strangled arc of a peace-loving people.
A young man’s journey of self-discovery illuminates the heart-wrenching history of the Chagos Archipelago, a little-known part of the world.
Coming-of-age in Mauritius, Désiré has always felt like an outsider. After all, he traces his ancestry back to Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean. But why does his birth certificate claim he was born in Seychelles? And why is his pet name also the name of a boat? The answers lie in the history of Diego Garcia, a tranquil island in the Chagos Archipelago that found itself in the crosshairs of the Cold War. The island, which was part of the British Empire for decades, eventually became part of Mauritius after that island nation won independence. But in some convoluted international maneuvering, the United States requested that Diego Garcia be handed over, uninhabited, for use as a strategic military base. The result: a forced evacuation of thousands of citizens in just an hour in 1968; natives were eventually displaced to Seychelles or Mauritius. Désiré and his mother Raymonde’s story is set against this tragic backdrop. A pregnant Raymonde is forced to evacuate but gives birth while at sea. The infant Désiré is hastily given papers at Seychelles before being packed along to Mauritius. Patel, a Mauritian journalist, uses her cast of characters to narrate a keenly observed story, translated from French, about displacement. “Memory is a hook that sinks into your skin. The harder you pull, the more it tears your flesh, the deeper it sinks. There is no way to get it out without ripping your skin apart,” one of the characters points out. If at times the story reads like a thinly veiled history lesson and the nonlinear narrative feels gimmicky, it nevertheless serves an important function: to inform readers about the unseen collateral damage of geopolitical games of Risk. The bullies on the playground dictate the terms since they know the weaker players have no currency they can truly leverage.
A fierce and evocative telling of the strangled arc of a peace-loving people.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63206-234-5
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Restless Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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