A sometimes biting, often sharply observed take on a relationship one would surely rather read about than be part of.
A French actress living in Los Angeles falls hard for a Cameroon-born actor whose obsession with directing a film adaptation of Heart of Darkness leads them both to his home country.
Readers looking for a feminist hero probably won’t find her in Solange, the white film actress at the center of Darrieussecq’s (All the Way, 2013, etc.) exploration of race, celebrity, and (mostly) unreciprocated love. Solange is instantly smitten when, at a party thrown by her friend George (as in Clooney, surname implied), she sees Kouhouesso, whose mere presence reduces her to “to silence and solitude. Soon she's sleeping with this handsome, self-serious man, whose “big idea”—a film version of Heart of Darkness, shot in Africa—will always, it’s clear from the start, be his first priority. Kouhouesso will disappear for days in between their encounters, texting occasionally but generally aloof. And so it goes: he works, she waits, and though their relationship turns more serious, it never really evolves. As a commentary on race, Darrieussecq’s novel doesn’t always break new ground (“Up until now she had scarcely thought about Africa, other than to send off a cheque”). As a chronicle of the humiliations and occasional joys of loving someone whose own feelings are more ambiguous, though, it feels queasily accurate. The story works especially well once the narrative shifts to Cameroon, where the details of the film shoot, from an ill-fated attempt to get a group of Pygmy girls to perform for the camera to various prop and costume setbacks, add some real comic edge to the proceedings.
A sometimes biting, often sharply observed take on a relationship one would surely rather read about than be part of.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-925240-91-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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