WHERE SHE HAS GONE - Kirkus Reviews

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by Nino Ricci ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 1998

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This beautifully written, quietly moving story impressively completes Italian-Canadian novelist Ricci’s autobiographical trilogy (The Book of Saints, 1991; In a Glass House, 1995). In those previous installments, Ricci chronicled, in painstaking and often painful detail, the childhood and youth in the Italian village of Valle del Sole of Vittorio Innocente; his passage to North America with his mother Cristina, a disgraced adulteress who died while en route to a promised reconciliation with her betrayed husband; and the difficult adaptation to life in Toronto made by “Victor” (his name now Anglicized), his embittered and exhausted father, and Victor’s half-sister Rita, Cristina’s bastard daughter, who was adopted and raised by a neighbor family. This final volume brings Rita and Victor together, when his father commits suicide and her adoptive family separates. Their unexpected intimacy propels Victor into a rigorous self-examination—and a return to his homeland in hopes of learning the truth about his mother’s “sin” and the identity of Rita’s father (about which he already has suspicions). The shocks that are in store for him effectively estrange Victor/Vittorio as much from his own identity as from those he feels compelled to love, but this skillfully plotted story nevertheless ends on a credibly hopeful note, following a powerful climax in London—midway between its protagonist’s two “worlds.” Ricci, a former president of PEN Canada, is a superb stylist whose unpretentious prose carries an emotional charge that gathers so slowly and surely that we’re surprised to find ourselves so moved by his characters’ stoically borne crises. And his use of symbolism is especially deft (the presence of antiquarian relics scattered around Villa del Sole, for example, subtly mocks the elusiveness of Victor’s own buried past). An extended work that rivals Pat Barker’s much better known WWI trilogy, and a saga of the immigrant experience that is unrivaled in English (and, very likely, Italian).

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Pub Date: July 15, 1998

ISBN: 0-312-18700-9

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Picador

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998

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LITERARY FICTION

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  TESTAMENT

  by Nino Ricci

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  IN A GLASS HOUSE

  by Nino Ricci

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  THE BOOK OF SAINTS

  by Nino Ricci

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• New York Times Bestseller

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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• New York Times Bestseller

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.

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Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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  BOOK OF LIVES

  by Margaret Atwood

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  FOURTEEN DAYS

  edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

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  by Margaret Atwood

More About This Book

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  Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

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  Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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BOOK LIST 20 Nonfiction Books That Are Total Page-Turners

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shop now amazon bookshop bookshelf ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

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Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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  GEORGE ORWELL

  by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

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  DIARIES

  by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

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  ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA

  by George Orwell

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