A parable worthy of comparison with the work of Kazantzakis, Camus, and Par Lagerkvist. Platonov’s translators have...
This is a lost treasure found: an allegorical masterpiece, written in 1935 (though unpublished in full until 1999), by one of the greatest modern Russian writers.
Platonov (1899–1951), a veteran of the Russian Revolution’s Red Army and a labor-camp survivor, worked as a war correspondent and an engineer before committing himself to the fiction that expressed—with lucid eloquence—his disillusionment with a social ideal that became the monolithic tyranny of Stalinism. Soul is closely related thematically to Platonov’s once-notorious anti-Stalinist satires Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, and its brooding, often poetically nuanced solidarity with humble characters’ lives links it with the highly praised short stories available in the English-language collection The Fierce and Beautiful World. The central figure, Nazar Chagataev, was born in the Central Asian desert region between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, abandoned for his own good by his impoverished mother, and educated at Moscow’s prestigious Institute of Economics. Upon graduation, Nazar is “assigned” to return to his homeland and “rescue” his people, a nomadic ethnic group called the Dzhan (“dzhan” being the Persian word for “soul”) by leading them to salvation through Communism. But this Moses is not embraced as the leader of his people—collectively characterized, brilliantly, as fiercely proud, resourceful, sexually potent, resolutely independent “souls.” Nazar’s unflappable idealism is (no doubt deliberately) reminiscent of the self-made “peasant” Lenin of Anna Karenina, and Platonov memorably dramatizes his simple goodness by showing it in action, in relationships with the rugged people whose integrity he respects, the pregnant woman he marries, her teenaged daughter for whom he assumes responsibility (and who comes to love him), and his aged mother, whose “sacrifice” of her son has led, paradoxically, to his mission and fulfillment.
A parable worthy of comparison with the work of Kazantzakis, Camus, and Par Lagerkvist. Platonov’s translators have performed an invaluable service.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-84343-038-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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