This features the agonizing young years of Asher Lev caught between the imperatives of his Hasid family's dynastic destiny and the forbidden visions of the goyische world of art. Asher's father exists, as did his fathers before him, within the rituals of prayer and sacrifice and does "good deeds" as the Brooklyn-based emissary of a Landovian Rebbe. He helps to establish schools, consolidate communities in Europe and to rescue Jews from Soviet oppression. But Asher, while haunted by his mythic ancestor calling him to follow his father, is also driven by his own compulsion to draw and paint. When it becomes obvious Asher cannot assume a preordained role, the Rebbe gives him a cautious blessing and Asher studies painting with Jacob Kahn, an elderly artist, while Asher's father deepens the silence which divides them. But his tormented mother is a weary voyager between the two, and it is Asher's knowledge of her suffering — a clearer vision of his own identity and an understanding of the many masks of atonement — that produce the masterpieces, two Crucifixions, which bring him both fame and exile. When Potok is writing of Crown Heights — the enclosed Hasidic structure of circumscribed piety, hierarchical certainties, and the close weave of obligations and dependencies — his work has a moving acuity. However the visual arts seem somewhat out of his reach and the creative impulse is articulated by Jacob in the declaratives of the Hemingway era: "I will teach you how to handle rage in color and line. You draw with too much love. . . ." But Potok, as in The Chosen, is able to sustain a singleminded gloomy intensity and will attract the same audience, assisted by the Literary Guild selection.
Pub Date: April 1, 1972
ISBN: 1400031044
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1973
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
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.
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
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