Le Tellier examines the possibilities of love after 40, and he deals with this issue with patience, understanding and...
Two love triangles (equal one love hexagon?) that reveal much—or at least enough—about love.
The first complication d’amour involves Thomas Le Gall, a psychiatrist in Paris. He waits for Anna Stein, one of his patients for 12 years and now finally getting ready to end her therapy. Toward the end of this session, she impulsively blurts out that she’s recently met Yves Janvier, a writer whom she finds intriguing. Le Gall duly notes this information and then a few hours later is struck by an erotic thunderbolt of his own in the form of Louise Blum, a lawyer whom he meets at a party and who could be Anna’s “blond twin.” Louise is married to a prominent scientist, Romain Vidal, whom she’s beginning to find lackluster and boring, while Anna is married to Stan, a prominent ophthalmologist. And while both family situations are complicated by children, amatory instincts begin to overtake the better judgment of the adults. Anna and Yves begin an affair, as do Thomas and Louise. French author Le Tellier occasionally and cleverly crosses the threads of his dual plot—e.g., by having Anna and Louise meet each other accidentally while shopping for clothes. And of course Anna makes her developing relationship with Yves (and deteriorating relationship with Romain) part of her confessional sessions with Le Gall. Tellingly, at one point she says, “ 'if I stay with Yves, I’ll have the life I’m dreaming of,’ ” which Le Gall repeats as, “ 'The life you’re dreaming of. You’re dreaming.’ ” Yves writes a short book based on his liaison with Anna Stein (Forty Memories of Anna Stein), which Le Tellier incorporates as part of his novel. Meanwhile, Romain sets up an appointment with Le Gall under an assumed name and uses this occasion to let the psychiatrist know that Romain is not in the dark about the affair Le Gall is engaged in with his wife.
Le Tellier examines the possibilities of love after 40, and he deals with this issue with patience, understanding and bemusement.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59051-399-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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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