An elegantly written, well-thought-through coming-of-age novel, with the requisite furtive embraces, broken hearts and...
Or, the callecita of crossed destinies—a moody novel of contemporary mores and amours across the water in Spain.
In recent years Spanish novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte has written several intellectual mysteries set in Spanish cities, all populated by men and women who smoke too much, drink too much, never sleep, and ponder the meaning of it all. Trueba, a screenwriter and director, imports a slightly cleaner-living crew of characters from the provinces of South America and mixes them up with native Spaniards who live slightly more healthful lives, but some of whom wind up dead all the same. One, very nearly, is young Sylvia, who, at the tender age of 16, gets mowed down by a car driven by soccer star Ariel, who could easily have gotten away with hit-and-run: “The accident would have been completely different if he weren’t a celebrity. He had been drinking, he was driving fast, it would be easy for the press to vent their anger on him, for it to get him into real trouble.” But Ariel, a gallant from Argentina, isn’t like that, and he faces up to Sylvia in a fumbling effort to secure forgiveness. Things get complicated—and steamy, with the understanding that the age of consent in Spain is likely lower than that in, say, Schenectady. Ariel goes back to the soccer pitch, while Sylvia’s world, once a place of comparative innocence, gets even more complicated, given that her father has just killed a man—“a man who had been, for several years, his best friend.” Shades of Meursault! Trueba’s story turns pensive and existential, but it’s also documentary, a chronicle of the lives of young people who, like kids everywhere, experiment sexually, smoke a little pot, lie to parents as their parents lied to their parents before them, and lust after pop-culture heroes. At turns the novel resembles Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander trilogy, albeit absent the constant mayhem, with its young heroine adrift in a world that offers few reasons to be trustful, and plenty to be otherwise.
An elegantly written, well-thought-through coming-of-age novel, with the requisite furtive embraces, broken hearts and missed signals.Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59051-322-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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