A highly questionable, sprawling, dispassionate, mordantly modern black comedy: more shock than awe.
A deliberately provocative fantasy of good intentions turned apocalyptic.
Dutch author Grunberg’s sensation-seeking new novel (Phantom Pain, 2004, etc.) may seem audacious to some, offensive to others. It tramples upon religious sentiments and makes use of anti-Semitic stereotypes in its examination of Swiss Xavier Radek’s ambition to serve a movement with enthusiasm, as did his German grandfather, a member of the SS. Radek chooses to bring comfort to the Jews—the same race his grandfather referred to as “enemies of happiness”—and so the boy attends synagogue, swims in the Rhine with young Zionists and makes friends with a rabbi’s son, Awromele, from whom he requests help to become circumcised. But the circumcision goes badly, leading to the amputation of one of Xavier’s testicles, which he keeps in a jar and calls “King David.” Plenty more savage and sexual material threads the story. Awromele and Xavier fall in love, and Awromele is badly beaten by a band of Kierkegaard-quoting boys as a result. Xavier is also the love object of Marc, his mother’s boyfriend; she, meanwhile, is viciously self-harming with a bread knife she calls her lover and eventually commits murder. Awromele and Xavier, who are working on translating Mein Kampf into Yiddish, relocate to Amsterdam to allow Xavier to train as an artist. Later they move to Israel where Xavier becomes a politician and is elected prime minister. “King David” is viewed by increasing numbers of Jews as the Redeemer returned in a unique guise, and Xavier sells nuclear warheads to small nations, thereby fulfilling his goal of bringing comfort to the Jews—in the form of world destruction. The Hitlerian parallels culminate with Xavier alone in a bunker, with his dogs and dead lover.
A highly questionable, sprawling, dispassionate, mordantly modern black comedy: more shock than awe.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-149-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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