Witty, intelligent, engrossing: Cameron (Andorra, 1997, etc.) offers a leisurely and old-fashioned narrative that...
An exceptionally moving and self-assured account of the odyssey of a young academic who sets off for South America to research the biography of an Uruguayan writer—and falls into a viper’s nest of deception and intrigue.
Graduate students (in the humanities, at least) aren’t usually noted for machinelike efficiency, but Omar Razaghi is ineffectual even by the low standards of academe. A doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, Omar is the sort who can set an apartment aflame and fall into quicksand with equal ease—but he is a fair scholar who knows how to write. His dissertation on the South American novelist Jules Gund has won him a fellowship with a generous stipend and guarantee of publication—if he can secure authorization for the biography he plans to write. Unfortunately, Gund’s literary estate is controlled by his three heirs (a wife, a mistress, and a brother), who turned down Omar’s polite letter requesting authorization. The matter probably would have ended there were it not for Omar’s more forceful girlfriend Deirdre, who convinces him to get on a plane and confront the family directly. In Uruguay, he quickly discovers that the opposition is not unanimous: Gund’s brother Adam is quite happy to agree to the biography—provided that Omar smuggle a few jewels back to America for him. Gund’s mistress Arden also seems open to argument—maybe because she finds that she more and more enjoys having Omar around to argue with. Only Gund’s widow Caroline is adamantly opposed. Could her resistance have something to do with the circumstances of Gund’s suicide? Or the unpublished manuscript of Gund’s last novel that she may or may not have destroyed? Is there some other, more hidden reason? It seems like an awful lot of work just to get a stipend.
Witty, intelligent, engrossing: Cameron (Andorra, 1997, etc.) offers a leisurely and old-fashioned narrative that nonetheless moves directly to a surprising but credible end.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-28197-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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