Another novel about a novelist, but radiantly colored, sensuous, respectful and rapt; an impressive debut.
Rudyard Kipling, living in rural Vermont, writes The Jungle Book and changes the destiny of his neighbors.
Vinton sets her first novel in the late-19th century and constructs it around the contrasting households of an emerging writer and a struggling immigrant farmer. Kipling and his proud, pregnant wife Carrie have arrived to build their dream house, Naulakha, on land adjacent to Jack Connolly's small spread. Kipling, with his exotic background combining India and England, relishes the beauty and isolation of this remote location; Connolly, Irish and disappointed, fumes against and fears the harsh winter and his endlessly backbreaking, scarcely profitable work. The families interact through Addie Connolly, who does the Kiplings’ laundry, and Jack's 11-year-old son Joe, who falls under the spell of Kipling's whimsical inventiveness. A dreamy, sensitive boy, Joe is initially enchanted by the writer's energy; when invited to advise on the story of Mowgli and his animal companions, he begins to identify with the fictional child. Winter closes in as Carrie—assisted by Addie—gives birth to a daughter, but Joe, having broken his leg in an accident, retreats a little from Kipling. In the spring, the writer asks Jack, an ex-railway man, to help dynamite some land. The combination of Jack's slow-burning anger, Kipling's distracting waywardness and Joe's torn loyalties leads to another, more emotional explosion. Joe runs away from home, leaving the two couples to go their separate ways. Addie sees the wisdom of Joe's absence and works to restore closeness with Jack; Kipling, simultaneously dominated and protected by Carrie, will achieve success but also experience great grief and loss. Vinton mines a rich vein of intensity whether writing about landscape and weather, or the soul-expanding possibilities of the creative life. While her characterizations can be overdrawn, especially those of the Kiplings, and the narrative oddly paced, the confident empathy of Vinton’s writing moves the story beyond its weak spots.
Another novel about a novelist, but radiantly colored, sensuous, respectful and rapt; an impressive debut.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-59692-149-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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