The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars "Are there any questions?" Holy patriarchal Christian dystopia! After killing Congress and the President, suspending the Constitution, and taking over bank accounts and the media, etc., in the mid-1980s a group of Christian fundamentalists founded the Republic of Gilead in the USA, applying a skewed interpretation of the Bible so as to deprive people of the freedom to do what they want so as to give them freedom from crime and violence. And to put women in their place. Atop the hierarchy are elite middle-aged men, Commanders of the Faithful. Angels of the Apocalypse (soldiers) fight wars on the borders of the state, while Eyes (secret police) hunt heretics like Quakers and Catholics. Then there are Guardians, chauffeurs and police and so on. Below all them are women, trapped in Gilead and confined to specific functions and colors: Commander’s Wives in blue (married in mass arranged weddings), Aunts in brown (sadistic and smarmy trainers), Marthas in green (cooks and servants), and then Handmaids in red (surrogate mothers). At the bottom are the Econowives of the poor, women who fulfill all functions at once. Romantic love is verboten, and sex is for procreation. The 4th of July is no longer observed, while Labor Day celebrates giving birth. The Children of Ham are relocated to reservations, while Jews convert or emigrate to Israel. Whales and wild fish are extinct. Generic prayers ordered by Wives on “Compuphones” are printed on paper (“Soul Scrolls”) and then recycled before anyone can read them. Do they reach God? The Handmaids have a nigh impossible duty: to get pregnant by the Commanders whose Wives are “barren.” (Of course, men are never sterile!) Furthermore, due to pollution, only one in four babies is viable. If the Handmaids fail in three different households, they are sent as “unwomen” to “colonies,” there to perform toxic waste cleanup. No artificial insemination in Gilead—everything is done “naturally” as inspired by a passage in Genesis, the aggrieved Wives lying face up on the bottom, the compliant Handmaids lying face down on the Wives, and the dutiful Commanders working away from atop the pile. About the only Handmaids to get pregnant do so illicitly via the doctors who give them monthly examinations or the Guards who work in their households. Handmaids are forbidden to read or write. They have tattooed ID numbers. They are loathed by Wives, conditioned by Aunts, resented by Marthas, patronized by Commanders, and ogled by Guards. The narrator of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a 33-year old Handmaid who’s called Offred (Commander Fred’s possession) and who never tells us her pre-Gilead name. Offred recounts entering a new Commander’s house across the river from Boston to get pregnant by him. This is her last chance to succeed. Into her present tense account—occurring in the first years of Gilead—she weaves past tense memories, including some from before Gilead (of her feisty feminist mother, her vibrant best friend from university Moira, and her rather generic husband Luke), and some from after Gilead (of the authorities separating her from her work, husband, and daughter and training her to be a Handmaid). Whether or not such a warped Christian fascist state could happen in the USA, Offred’s present and past narratives make a compelling picture of post- and pre-Gilead life. This is largely because Offred is observant, intelligent, sensitive, and creative. She has a poetic turn of mind and phrase, an eye and an ear for the vivid detail and the impressive metaphor, like “Hatred fills my mouth like spit” and “His skin unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab.” She likes to explore the different meanings of words like compose, story, and job: “I wait, for the household to assemble. Household: that is what we are. The Commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part. The hold of a ship. Hollow.” Offred has a motivation to tell her story in the present tense. She wants to keep Moira and Luke alive, changing “was” to “is” when she slips up, and she is trying to remain absolutely aware in her present to avoid losing herself in her past, when she could live and love more freely. She is telling us her story to make us (“you”) real. “I tell, therefore you are.” The literary quality of Offred’s narration highlights the waste that Gilead makes of women like her but also that the USA made of women like her (her pre-Gilead work was transferring physical books to disks), which then makes us think about such things in our own society now. Indeed, Atwood doesn’t gloss over the gender inequalities and dangers for girls and women before the advent of her dystopia. Although Offred was freer and happier in the old days (our days), America before the Republic of Gilead was no utopia for women, who were often victims of male condescension, pornography, and violence. Offred’s tale is followed by “Historical Notes” taken in 2195 at a Symposium of the Gileadian Research Association, when the Republic of Gilead is a quaint historical field for scholars, like a professor who speaks about problems of authentication with The Handmaid’s Tale manuscript. The world 200 years later has survived Gilead, and fish are back, and male and female scholars seem equal, but the professor makes sexist jokes denigrating women, tells his audience not to censure but understand Gilead, and is after all a man interpreting a woman’s words and life and determining their authenticity. Will there ever be true equality between the sexes? Offred is no action-movie heroine. She says at one point, “It’s truly amazing what people can get used to.” At another, “I am a wimp.” She is honest: “It didn’t happen that way either. I’m not sure how it happened; not exactly. All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.” Despite (or because of?) all that, the novel is suspenseful because of the dangers of her daily life in Gilead. At any moment anyone can betray or destroy her. Readers who like dystopia stories in which protagonists bring down totalitarian states ala The Hunger Games may not enjoy Atwood’s novel, which is closer to bleak dystopias like 1984 (though perhaps Atwood’s ambiguity makes her novel more hopeful than Orwell’s). Her novel is moving and provocative, ending “Are there any questions?” Reading the audiobook, Claire Danes sounds like Offred recording her own words on tapes. View all my reviews
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For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll
My rating: 3 of 5 stars An Entertaining (but maybe forgettable) Cat Lovers’ Fantasy “For He Can Creep” (2019) has a splendid concept for a “novelette”: write about Christopher Smart's cat Jeffrey trying to save the 18th-century poet's soul (and the world) from the devil's machinations while the poet is confined in an insane asylum. I love Smart's poem "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey" (part of his long poem Jubilate Agno [c. 1760]), so full it is of comical and sublime, realistic and spiritual observations about his feline asylum companion’s daily life. Like, For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest. For there is nothing brisker than his life when in motion. And like For by stroking of him I have found out electricity. For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire. For the Electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which God sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast. For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements. For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer. For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped. For he can tread to all the measures upon the music. For he can swim for life. For he can creep. And Siobhan Carroll writes a story suitable for an eccentric, 18th-century literati-illuminati like Christopher Smart, from the point of view of his cocky cat: "Nevertheless, the devil made a grave mistake when he annoyed Jeoffry. He will pay for his insolence." She also writes a cool devil, tricky and seductive and powerful and malevolent, but not a bad sport, in his way. Like this: "'Is anything truly ours?' The devil sighs and examines his claws. He is simultaneously a monstrous serpent, a mighty angel, and a handsome black cat with whiskers the color of starlight. The cat's whiskers are singed, the serpent's scales are scarred, and the angel's brow is heavy with an ancient grievance, and yet he is still beautiful, in his way. 'But more of this later. Jeoffry, I have come to converse with you. Will you not take a walk with me?'" The story soon has Jeoffry and friends (including a formidable "cat" called the Nighthunter Moppet) taking on Satan while the cat's earnest but rather clueless and ineffectual master works on a poem... It was a fun read! Cat lovers should love it! Poetry lovers, too--though I wish there'd been more of Smart's poetry or Carroll’s pastiche of it and less action. Perhaps the best part of the novelette is the title, which is the last line of Smart’s poem about Jeoffry. I also think that confirming that Smart is not insane (the devil IS out to get a poem out of him) leaves the story less ambiguous than I’d have liked. And I have to confess that I forgot reading the story until two months later (now) when Amazon suggested I write a review of it. The Kindle version was more than worth its cheap price (.95 cents). View all my reviews
Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Never love a wild thing” In a bar in NYC in 1956, the anonymous narrator (a writer) sees a photo of a “primitive” African sculpture depicting a woman who can only be Holly Golightly. Had she really been to Africa? What was she doing now? Where was she? Was she dead, crazy, or married? The narrator then remembers and tells the story of when, back in the autumn of 1943 during WWII, he moved into the Upper East Side brownstone apartment above Holly’s and, while trying to become a published writer, became friends with her and learned her personality and past and loved her and lost her. Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is therefore a nostalgic novella painting a portrait of NYC in the early 1940s and especially of the small-town Texas child-bride turned “café society celebrity and girl about NY.” Holly is “two months shy of nineteen” when the narrator first meets her. Her business card says her occupation is “traveling,” and her apartment always looks like it’s just been moved into. She doesn’t like zoos with all their caged wild animals. She carries herself with a self-amused attitude, calls people “Darling,” and sprinkles her conversation with French words, like “Not un peu bit.” She smokes and drinks. Her varicolored blond hair (cut like a boy’s) and green eyes light up the air around her. She’s elegantly thin, healthy, and clean. What does she do for money? Go out with men who pay for her entertainment and give her nice gifts. She sometimes sleeps with them in her apartment, but also says, “I’ve only had eleven lovers—does that make me a whore?” According to O J Berman, the Hollywood agent who took Holly under his wing when she tried to but gave up becoming a movie star, she’s a phony, but a real phony, because she believes all the fictions she fabricates. Whatever she pretends or believes, Holly wants to stay true to herself and wants to find a place where she belongs, a real-life place that makes her feel like breakfast at Tiffany’s (where she goes when the “mean reds” hit her). “Be anything but a coward,” she says. The movie with Audrey Hepburn as Holly (apparently Capote wanted Marylin Monroe to play the role) generally follows the spirit and action of the novella, with some exceptions. The novella’s ending is more poignant, sad, and somehow hopeful than the corny, unconvincing movie ending. There is no romance between Holly and the narrator in the novella, much though the narrator would have wished there to have been. George Pepard is miscast as the narrator in the movie, while Mickey Rooney’s playing a Japanese American (with buck teeth, accented English, and hysterical behavior) must be a landmark in offensive Asian stereotyping, while his character’s role in the novella, the professional photographer Mr. Yunioshi, is much more benign and underplayed. Capote writes vivid descriptions (e.g., “Rusty’s raw baby buttocks face” or “She gleamed like a transparent child”) and funny lines (e.g., “I like a man who sees the humor [during sex]. Most of them are all pant and puff”). There is Capote’s self-deprecating take down of aspiring “serious” writers: “I’ve never been to bed with a writer. Are you a real writer? Does anyone buy what you write?” But although there is plenty of NYC in the story—e.g., Central Park, the Frick Museum, Sing Sing prison, some street and shop names, the city lights, etc.—Holly dominates. If you like well-written character studies about independent, strong, witty women who know how to use men to get what they want but who always seem lonely, unlucky, and sad, especially such stories set in NYC in the 1940s, and if you don’t mind some dated details, including some insulting references to homosexuality and race, you’d probably like the story. It isn’t as norm-challenging as it seemed in the late 1950s and early 60s, but it is entertaining and moving. Audiobook reader Michael C. Hall gives a professional performance without overdoing it. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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