Timely and nuanced.
A novel that interrogates the intersection of love, desire, and abuse.
Ralph Boyd, a renowned avant-garde composer, is in his 70s and fighting cancer. Daphne Greenslay has emerged from a few volatile, precarious decades into middle-aged peace. She’s a single mother, living across the Thames from the home where she lived as a girl. Daphne is also an artist, and she’s working on a piece about her unconventional childhood. Ralph figures prominently in this dreamlike, Edenic collage. Daphne’s parents were upper-class bohemians—her father a writer and her mother a Greek expat involved in radical politics—and Ralph was part of their circle of friends, comrades, and acolytes. Instantly captivated by the dark-haired, dark-eyed, and slightly feral child Daphne, Ralph made himself her confidant and special friend as he made her his muse. He also made her his lover. Or he raped her. Zinovieff's (The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, 2015, etc.) novel turns on the rupture between these two ways of viewing the past. For Ralph, the girl Daphne is a talismanic figure. His love for her is unique and pure, and memories of their trysts sustain him through the pain and indignities of chemotherapy and old age. For Daphne, Ralph is a significant player in a romanticized version of her childhood, her relationship with him one of the more benign parts of her wild history. Then Daphne reconnects with her one-time best friend, Jane, who encourages her to see Ralph in a new and damning light. Zinovieff is obviously working with themes playing out in contemporary culture, but her novel is also reminiscent of the work of Iris Murdoch and A.S. Byatt. Like these English novelists who precede her, Zinovieff is interested in the dynamics of families who see themselves as outside the norm, and, like Murdoch and Byatt, she is concerned with moral dilemmas that don’t have easy solutions. Deciding to let Ralph, Daphne, and Jane each have their say in alternating chapters makes it possible for the author to present the full complexity of her subject.
Timely and nuanced.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-284757-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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