A simple story, on its face, but full of resounding depths: a dark commemoration of a dark time but offering the slim hope...
Krivák (The Sojourn, 2011, etc.) returns to home ground in this elegiac story of rural life in a time of turmoil.
If this were Turgenev, Krivák’s characters would be peasants, sturdy caretakers of the soil with a sure awareness that life is hard and fleeting. As it is, the Vinich clan, descended of a Slovak immigrant who saw all he cared to of war in the trenches of Galicia, is a salt-of-the-earth breed, unassuming and mostly steady, even a little wealthy “in a town where land meant wealth.” Bo, perhaps the steadiest of them all, goes off to college to read the Greeks and learn a little about the world beyond their narrow valley in the Endless Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania; he returns home to take his place among the sawyers and farmers, even as the patriarch slides toward death and his brother, Sam, ships off to Vietnam, there to be lost—missing in action, the official forms say. Krivák’s modest story finds Bo trying to do the right thing by all concerned while living up to some of his book-learned ideals; called on to act heroically, he does so while otherwise serving as the guardian of a fragile mother, the preserver of family memory, and, indeed, the beacon to guide his brother home. In one of the book’s most affecting moments, he travels to West Virginia to meet a member of Sam’s unit, who evokes the terror of Vietnam: “You want to talk about ghosts? Fucking VC….Not a sound in that jungle except the sticks we broke on the ground and our boots when we pulled them out of the mud.” Should they erect a tombstone? Like Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter, set in a neighboring country and addressing some of the same themes, this is a story about love and loyalty, with moments of sudden violence and great beauty.
A simple story, on its face, but full of resounding depths: a dark commemoration of a dark time but offering the slim hope that things will get better.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2637-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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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