While she compellingly evokes the journey out of childhood, as well as loneliness, self-determination, and the magnetic pull...
Brazilian literary titan Lispector (Complete Stories, 2015, etc.) expands on themes familiar to fans of her dense, rich, inimitable style in this, her second novel, originally published in 1946 and now translated into English for the first time.
Told almost entirely in a third-person stream-of-consciousness style, the story follows Virginia, the youngest of three siblings growing up on Quiet Farm in Upper Marsh in a sparsely furnished family mansion with velvet-lined floors. She is slavishly attached to her brooding brother, Daniel. "She didn't even know what she was thinking, all she had was ardor, nothing more, not even a point. And he—all he had was fury." Sometimes she molds little sculptures from river clay, "a task that would never end, that was the most beautiful and careful thing she had ever known." Secretive, philosophical, intense, the siblings create the Society of Shadows, the two of them its only members: "They had foreseen the charmed and dangerous beginning of the unknown, the momentum that came from fear." As elsewhere in her work, Lispector is fascinated by moments, often fleeting and barely articulated, of dawning self-awareness. "Yes, yes, little by little, softly, from her ignorance the idea was being born that she possessed a life." Virginia and Daniel eventually leave Upper Marsh for the city. Virginia sees the sea, rents her own apartment, takes a lover. The novel follows her from moment to closely noted moment, as for example, taking a walk before a dreaded dinner party: "What she was feeling was without depth....Quick thick circles were moving away from her heart—the sound of a bell unheard but heavily felt in the body in waves—the white circles were blocking her throat in a big hard bubble of air—there was not even so much as a smile, her heart was withering, withering, moving off through the distance hesitating intangible, already lost in an empty and clean body whose contours were widening, moving away, moving away and all that existed was the air, thus all that existed was the air, the air without knowing that it existed and in silence, in silence high as the air." Passages like this comprise the bulk of the book. Of Virginia later, dozing on the train: "her lucidity was the raw brightness of the moonlight itself; but she didn't know what she was thinking; she was thinking...like a bird that just flies." Readers already acquainted with The Hour of the Star will note a number of parallels. In some ways, this is a bigger, larger-hearted version, more intimate and more generous, though similarly dense.
While she compellingly evokes the journey out of childhood, as well as loneliness, self-determination, and the magnetic pull of family, Lispector's signature brilliance lies in the minutely observed gradations of her characters' feelings and of their elusive, half-formed thoughts.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2313-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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