Poignant and tender without being sentimental, the novel achieves its powerful emotive effects through simplicity and...
An unadorned and heartbreaking tale of a young boy coming of age during World War II.
Appelfeld (Laish, 2009, etc.) introduces us to Hugo Mansfeld, who is just about to turn 11 and who, without being aware of it, is more on the cusp of adulthood than of adolescence. Life in the ghetto has recently become unbearably tense and stressful. Hugo’s father, a pharmacist, has been taken to a labor camp, and his mother is desperately looking for somewhere safe to place her son, perhaps in a local village near the Carpathian Mountains. After several plans fall through because some possible rescuers have been transported to camps by the German authorities, Hugo’s mother places her son with Mariana, an old childhood friend who’s “fallen low.” Hugo quickly learns he is not allowed to go outside and must spend his nights in the closet of Mariana’s sumptuous bedroom. A quiet child who at first likes to spend his time playing chess and reading, Hugo is also sensitive, reflective and almost comically polite. It turns out that Mariana is a prostitute, and the place where she lives, The Residence, is a brothel, but for a while Mariana succeeds in keeping Hugo’s whereabouts a secret. Eventually, in her loneliness and alcoholic wooziness, she innocently takes Hugo to her bed for solace and companionship. He loves being comforted in Mariana’s warm embrace, but as life in this Ukrainian village comes under increasing threat from retreating Germans and advancing Russians, they become lovers. After Hugo has been with Mariana for over a year, the Residence closes down altogether, and they travel the sparse countryside, trying to pass themselves off as mother and son. In time, however, Mariana is caught, and the Russians don’t take kindly to women who have consorted with Germans. Throughout their harrowing ordeal Mariana tries to hold on to some semblance of faith in a God she feels she has abandoned—or vice versa.
Poignant and tender without being sentimental, the novel achieves its powerful emotive effects through simplicity and understatement—a beautiful read.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4280-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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