Fans of Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring may snatch this one up, but in truth it seems less suited for a general...
Financial insecurity and the Plague hover threateningly over the great artist and his beloved servant, narrator of this sad and obtuse tale.
In 1649, a girl named Hendrickje Stoffels arrived in Amsterdam as a servant in the household of the master painter Rembrandt. Stoffels was a real person, used here by Matton in a fictional memoir from Stoffels’s perspective. The luxury of the big city is an adjustment for the girl—“For the first time in my life, I’m not going to sleep sitting up.” At 20, she’s a quick study, fits smoothly into the household’s workings, and is soon modeling for the master. With little fanfare, she also becomes Rembrandt’s lover and muse. But as Rembrandt’s fortunes decline, the outside world also begins to intrude on their happy home. The Plague is ever-present, with Stoffels’s country superstitions about it peppering the narrative. After she gives birth to a girl, she is known throughout the fickle city as “Rembrandt’s whore,” and when the artist’s debts force him into bankruptcy, society circles in closer, buying up his possessions at a humiliating auction. Meanwhile, the number of dead rises daily. Descriptions of life in 17th-century Amsterdam are sensuous and vivid, but Stoffels’s episodic story does too little to create tension or a sense of attachment to the characters. The girl’s love for Rembrandt is well rendered, but through her rose-colored view we see little of the real man. Characters enter and exit with little consequence, while so important a detail as the first romantic encounter between Rembrandt and Stoffels gets little prominence. A grimly amusing theme is Stoffels’s insistence—widely believed at the time—that cats and dogs were responsible for the Plague, but that rats were helpful killers of other vermin and should be spared.
Fans of Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring may snatch this one up, but in truth it seems less suited for a general audience than for Rembrandt enthusiasts.Pub Date: May 20, 2002
ISBN: 1-84195-175-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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
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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