Like its predecessor, Small Worlds (1996), Hoffman's second in a series limns an affectionate and affecting portrayal of Polish Jews resettled in 20th-century America. The year is 1920, and the settling St. Louis—specifically, ``the world of Prohibition and syndicated crime and fixed ball games.'' Inhabitants of the village of Krimsk, on the Russian border, once again dominant, include the ``Krimsker Rebbe'' Yaakov Moshe Finebaum, whose assimilation into his new homeland takes surpassingly strange forms (the sight of ``blood-red'' Mississippi waters evokes memories of the biblical Israelites in Egypt, and the Rebbe's appointment to the Governor's Council on Indian Affairs has him wondering if these American natives are in fact descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes), and ``puritanical'' junk-dealer Boruch Levi Rudman, determined to bully his family and neighbors into upholding their culture's dignity. Hoffman paces his amusing narrative beautifully, introducing (that is, re-introducing) ``new'' characters at strategically spaced intervals. The story's main events occur on a busy Sabbath day, during which the unregenerate Matti Sternweiss, a professional athlete whose canny intelligence has elevated him to the position of starting catcher for the hometown St. Louis Browns, must decide whether to go through with his scheme to ``throw'' a crucial game to the visiting Detroit Tigers—and must, at the crucial moment, face the malignant specter of the great Ty Cobb, spikes flashing, speeding toward him at home plate. Several subplots are neatly worked in (including a beauty that involves Boruch Levi's lustful sister Malka and her submissive captive husband), as are two haunting images from the Krimskers' European past: a dream of burning cats, and the vision of a mail plane crashing to earth. A wistful last scene, set in 1936 after the resolution of these crises (and the demise of Prohibition), clearly points toward a continuation of their story. First-rate fiction: reminiscent as noted of such precursors as Sholom Aleichem, but possessed of distinctive individual strengths and firmly rooted in its characters' strange new land and even stranger adventures.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-7892-0191-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Abbeville Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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