Buarque has created a warm, engaging, memorable first-person voice in his credulous and well-meaning Costa, the whole...
A seamless, delectable narrative about a ghostwriter who immerses himself in the Hungarian language, by the daring Brazilian pop lyricist and novelist (Turbulence, 1991, etc.) who’s too little known here.
Jose Costa is the unappreciated genius behind the writing services of Cunha & Costa Cultural Agency, overlooking Rio’s Copacabana Beach: he writes speeches for presidents and heads of unions and, eventually, an autobiography for a German executive, Kaspar Krabbe, that becomes a literary bestseller. But writing another’s life begins to feel like “having an affair with somebody else’s wife,” and, though he puffs up with vanity, Costa isn’t really sure who he is. After an emotionally wrenching meeting at the convention of anonymous writers’ in Melbourne, Costa gets rerouted for the night in Budapest, where he becomes intrigued by the jealously guarded way that Hungarian is spoken by the locals—and by the sweetly bitter pumpkin rolls he devours at the hotel, a food that subsequently serves as a kind of madeleine to his memory. Undervalued by his agency’s boss, and by his lovely but spoiled TV newsreader wife, who thinks he’s a hack, Costa returns to the beguiling Budapest and meets up with the woman who will serve as his muse and teacher, Kriska: “One does not learn the Magyar language from books,” she informs him point-blank, then initiates him relentlessly, sensuously, into total immersion in her language. Back and forth between Rio and Budapest goes Costa—now Zsoze Kosta—his narrative fluid as he humorously mocks, then gravely assumes his new tongue, all in preparation for his abandoning Portuguese altogether and becoming an established imposter in his adopted language.
Buarque has created a warm, engaging, memorable first-person voice in his credulous and well-meaning Costa, the whole translated here gorgeously and sinuously: sentences at random can be picked and savored for delicacy and rhythm.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1782-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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