All Souls’ Day displays with admirable lucidity the workings of a humane, civilized, and consistently interesting mind. But...
A documentary filmmaker’s tenuous hold on both reality and the past occupies the foreground of this very discursive 1998 novel by the prizewinning Dutch author (The Following Story, 1994, etc.).
On All Souls’ Day, November 2nd, prayers are offered on behalf of those who dwell in Purgatory. This practice neatly symbolizes the condition of 45-year-old Arthur Daane, who is mourning the deaths of his wife and son in a plane crash, and relocates to Berlin (after reunification)—reasoning that a place that has its own painful history to deal with is where he may as well be. There’s very little more in the way of action or incident here than this, as Nooteboom fills the story with Daane’s meditations on photography, history, art, the ideas of eminent philosophers (he has made a film about Nietzsche, and considers Walter Benjamin as a subject), and other matters: generally, the filmmaker’s (and the writer’s) vain efforts to capture and “stop” time, thus preventing it from elapsing. There are also numerous conversations with fellow émigrés and friends, including sculptor-writer Victor Leven (eternally haunted by the memory of WWII), “philosopher-turned-lunatic” Arthur Tieck (who has appeared in Daane films), and—back home in The Netherlands—Daane’s platonic confidante Erna, who isn’t much more than a device to help keep the talk flowing. When Daane meets lissome history student Elik Olanje, and follows her to Spain, dramatic things begin happening—too late, alas, to vitiate the reader’s conviction that he has been subject to an intolerably overextended harangue.
All Souls’ Day displays with admirable lucidity the workings of a humane, civilized, and consistently interesting mind. But it’s just barely a novel, and few readers are likely to stay its tortuous and redundant course.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-100566-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
IN THE NEWS
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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