Longer on wisdom than either surprise or delight, this will mainly interest readers who have been captivated by Keilson’s...
The first American publication of this 1947 novella accompanies the reissue of the German author’s The Death of the Adversary.
When the latter novel was translated for American publication in 1962, it received considerable acclaim for its illumination of emotional ambiguity during the rise to power of an unnamed Hitler. This shorter, slighter work by Keilson, a psychoanalyst who fled to the Netherlands in 1936 (and celebrated his 100th birthday last year), shares certain qualities with his masterwork, in its depiction of everyday detail and ritual against a backdrop—largely offstage—of unthinkable evil. Yet this is plainly minor work in comparison, not nearly as provocative nor as psychologically acute. A Dutch couple harbors a refugee for a year, keeping his existence as much of a secret as they can. Yet Nico, their secret upstairs housemate, may have some secrets of his own that he’s keeping from them. The dynamic among them shifts subtly over the year that he spends with them: “It stood like a wall between him and them, which slowly, slowly crumbled as the war dragged on and everything out of the ordinary and inhuman became typical and everyday.” One of the things that changes is the state of Nico’s health, which threatens to compromise the secret of his existence, and which ultimately results in a role reversal that represents whatever comedy there might be in this mirthless narrative. “He had defended himself against death from without, and then it had carried him off from within,” writes the author. “It was like a comedy where you expect the hero to emerge onstage, bringing resolution, from the right. And out he comes from the left...Later, though, the audience members go home surprised, delighted, and a little bit wiser for the experience.”
Longer on wisdom than either surprise or delight, this will mainly interest readers who have been captivated by Keilson’s better work.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-12675-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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