Taut, nuanced stories that offer a rich multigenerational chronicle of Israel since its birth.
Mandelman’s probing third collection, the first published in the U.S., offers nine stories about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Pity” follows Mickey—a Mossad agent who appears in several of the pieces at various stages of his life—and his Moroccan colleague as they track a former Nazi war criminal known as “The Smiler” to a Paris neighborhood. Their goal: to abduct him and bring him to Israel for trial. Only if something goes wrong are they to kill him. The narrator, whose father helped catch Eichmann, has been trained not to have a soft heart. On the day of the operation, the former Nazi’s routine changes (he has his young niece and her girlfriends with him), and the operation goes wildly awry. In “Terror,” the young son of Auschwitz survivors living in Tel Aviv watches his five-year-old brother respond to another child’s taunts with violence. The injured child’s mother begins to beat his brother, and the narrator shames himself by joining the crowd of children who chant, “Serves you right.” That night his father, who has just returned from leading the first ever Israeli retribution operation against Arab terrorists who had attacked a kindergarten, thrashes him furiously for betraying his brother. “Test” takes Mickey through his final exercise before he becomes a Mossad agent. It’s a fake takedown in a Tel Aviv neighborhood. As his group waits on the roof for the right moment to “shoot” the target (with a camera instead of a gun), they’re distracted by a moaning woman who seems to be giving birth. They go to her aid, only to find she’s a decoy to distract them. “Mish-Mash” adopts a more comic tone, describing the mischief created by a winning lottery ticket in the household of the narrator’s uncle Nathan—his two wives, mistress, four children and the plumber who lives with one of the wives. In the title story, a retired Mickey begs to go along on the retribution mission against terrorists who attacked a kibbutz nursery.
Taut, nuanced stories that offer a rich multigenerational chronicle of Israel since its birth.Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 1-58322-669-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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