A story of remarkable endurance at sea conveyed unremarkably.
Adrift in a disabled boat in the Pacific, two fishermen try to survive.
Despite the weather forecast, Bolivar, a brash fisherman and drinker who’s desperate for money, insists on heading out to fish. The only problem? His partner is missing. So his boss introduces him to Hector, a sensitive teenager without any serious experience at sea. Even before the storm damages their engine and blows them hundreds of miles into the Pacific, the two men are at odds, but, adrift at sea—with no radio, a minimum of fishing gear, and diminishing chances of rescue—they're forced to reckon more deeply with each other and themselves and various miragelike visions of the lives behind them on land. Can they learn to respect each other? Can they vanquish their dehydration, starvation, the maddening vastness of the sea? Can they keep each other alive? Irish novelist Lynch (Grace, 2017, etc.) is at his most memorable when relating the details of sea life and survival: The sea is a veritable marketplace of plastic bags, barrels, cups, and other useful things; an albatross’ “insides are full of undigested plastic”; a captured turtle “gestures some unfathomable thought with its flippers”; and the men subsist on fish, seabirds, and barnacles scraped from the hull of the boat and seasoned with brine. But Lynch’s characters are less impressive than these details, perhaps because they seem too-perfectly-constructed foils for one another: Hector’s religiosity, for example, feels less like an authentically worn belief than a useful contrast to Bolivar’s materialism and secular hope. And though Lynch at times beautifully encapsulates the harshness of life on the ocean—“each bead of water that passes the lips…is a drop of time and life distilled”—his sentences are too often stilted, overstylized, and full of half-profound sentimentality: “[Bolivar] studies the outness of the world. The profound colours of night. His ear attending to the silence. A growing feeling of awareness coming upon him. What you are among this. He imagines an ocean full of container ships and tankers, each ship moving constant and true and yet all passing within this same silence, the silence itself passing within this outness that is itself always silent.”
A story of remarkable endurance at sea conveyed unremarkably.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-11243-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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