A haunting novel with real emotional depth, Celt's psychologically nuanced debut continues to resonate long after the last...
A family curse haunts four generations of women.
Lulu, a world-class soprano, gives birth to her daughter, Kara, on the same night her beloved grandmother Ada dies. (“Proximity between birth and death runs in every family, but it seems to run especially close in ours.”) This is the family curse: each mother must give something up for her daughter, each daughter drawing new power by depleting the reserves of her mother. Kara’s birth—a difficult one—has rendered Lulu unable to sing. Doctor’s orders, technically. Also, fear: traditionally, new mothers in the family sing their daughters into this world—“Lending them our voices,” Ada had said, but for Lulu such a loan is an unbearable risk. “My voice is my everything,” she says. “To bring her into the world I lost my grandmother. If I lend her my voice, can I trust her to give it back?" Alone with the infant, the silent opera star fills her days with memories of the women who came before her: her mother, Sara, a jazz singer, exquisite and absent; her grandmother, Ada, who immigrated from Poland, pregnant, the only one of her siblings to escape the war; and finally the otherworldly Greta, the family matriarch and the root of the curse. One woman after the other, each more perfect and more musical than the last. Drawing inspiration from the myth of the rusalka and spanning four generations, from Poznán to Chicago to the stages of Paris, Arizona, and Ulaanbaatar, Celt’s family saga—steeped in folklore and vibrating with music—is as much about the power of storytelling as the fraught relationships between mothers and daughters. If the novel’s lyrical seriousness sometimes seems to weigh it down, it’s a small price to pay for such richness.
A haunting novel with real emotional depth, Celt's psychologically nuanced debut continues to resonate long after the last page has been turned.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63149-045-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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