A compulsive series of journeys across the map of postwar Europe absorbs the narrator and protagonist of Israeli writer Appelfeld's haunting 11th novel (Unto the Soul, 1994, etc.)—an elegy, as are all its predecessors, for the Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Two of their number were the parents of Erwin Siegelbaum, a rootless survivor who ``lives,'' 40 years afterward, only on trains, traveling each year along a ``route'' that begins at the station where he and fellow prisoners were abandoned by their Nazi captors just prior to their liberation—and ending, in Erwin's imagination, only when he will at last discover, and execute, the German officer who murdered his family. It's a striking conception, and Appelfeld develops from it a surprisingly dramatic, engrossing novel, given its absence of a conventional plot. We learn that his narrator survived after the war as a smuggler, and in later years ekes out a living buying and reselling ``Jewish antiquities, manuscripts, books . . . everything that was buried for years in cellars and attics.'' Oddly muted descriptions of the people he meets during his ``travels'' and comes to know over the years (a rabbi who faithfully tends a long-abandoned synagogue, an elderly spinster who mourns the passing of her beloved cow) mingle with complex memories of Erwin's father (a Jewish Communist Part activist who spent the war years ``underground'') and mother (herself a deeply engaged rebel, later estranged from her husband). A further dimension is added by the narrator's own moral uncertainty (unlike other Jews, he desires not a home in the Promised Land, but revenge) and wavering purpose: He wonders whether he can kill, right up to the moment when he confronts his elderly prey. One reads Appelfeld not for plot or characterization, but for the intriguing variations he works on his single obsessive theme. This unsparing portrayal of a modern Wandering Jew is one of his most challenging and troubling fictions. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 1998
ISBN: 0-8052-4158-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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
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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