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SUDDEN DEATH

An innovative if knotty study of geopolitics in the Age of Discovery.

A tennis match between a poet and a painter serves as an extended metaphor on the messy clash between colonialism and art.

It’s 1599. On one side of a court in Rome is the Italian painter Caravaggio; on the other, the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. Why they’ve been pitted against each other isn’t immediately clear, but we’re told it’s a “contest of life and death,” and truly enough, the novel becomes an impressionistic study of Europe’s violent conquest of the New World. (As Enrigue himself writes, the book is “not exactly about a tennis match.”) The story returns intermittently to the match, but Enrigue largely eschews a traditional narrative arc. His chapters bound from quotations from priests, Shakespeare, and Sir Thomas More to contemplations of Caravaggio’s paintings to scenes of courtly squabbles during the Counter-Reformation to observations of Aztec culture on its way to demolition by the Spanish conquistadors and comic scenes of the match, which somehow claims Mary Magdalene in attendance. (There’s also a tall tale about tennis balls made with the hair of the beheaded Anne Boleyn.) That gives the novel a head-spinning breadth—Enrigue means to capture the many global resonances of sexual, religious, and artistic struggles, most of them bad news for those not in power. But Enrique’s style can be jarring; the high tone of art criticism and history lessons can grate against the more satirical scenes on the tennis court. In one scene, Caravaggio and Quevedo are forced to participate in a foot race between sets: “Bites, elbow jabs, and clutches followed as both men rolled on the stones like children.” As an allegory of the atrocities conducted by countries in the name of liberation, the moment has a certain allegorical force. But Enrigue’s walking a fine line between expressions of sorrow and satire, which can often leave the reader feeling as baffled as a spectator to the match as the participants were for being part of it.

An innovative if knotty study of geopolitics in the Age of Discovery.

Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-59463-346-1

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Riverhead

Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

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THINGS FALL APART

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

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