A speedy and suspenseful fish-out-of-water tale with a slyly philosophical bent.
A stolen backpack in Casablanca prompts a host of more psychological losses for the heroine of this high-tension narrative.
Every novel by Vida explores what distance from home can do to an American woman’s perception of herself, whether the locale is the Philippines (And Now You Can Go, 2003), Lapland (Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, 2007), or Turkey (The Lovers, 2010). Here, the unnamed narrator has arrived in Morocco for a solitary getaway—the details as to why aren’t disclosed till the ending—but the backpack containing her laptop, camera, credit cards, and passport is taken from her just as she’s checking into her hotel. The Kafkaesque plot turns that ensue serve to further erase her from the map; she claims another woman’s papers from a backpack the police wrongly believe is hers; a police report she needs to recover her identity goes missing; and, in a turn that occupies the heart of the novel, she takes a job as a stand-in for a famous actress who’s filming a movie in the city. The novel’s second-person voice is a not-so-subtle prompt for the reader to think about how he or she might act in these predicaments and a more slippery prompt to think about what identity is: who are “you” when your family, sense of place, and skills are expunged? Vida’s plainspoken, sometimes ice-cold minimalist style serves the question well, though the novel struggles to arrive at a clean conclusion, even a cleanly ambiguous one. Juggling the heroine’s Casablanca predicament with an increasingly wrenching recollection of the emotional messes she left back in the States, Vida works in unlikely coincidences and fits of flightiness to sell the character’s sense of dispossession. But the novel still packs a wallop, taking the themes of Camus and Kierkegaard and transplanting them into a story with the pace and intrigue of a page-turner.
A speedy and suspenseful fish-out-of-water tale with a slyly philosophical bent.Pub Date: June 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-211091-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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