Mesmerizing.
McCann traces the trajectory of a Gypsy poet’s exile.
Drawing on extensive research and visits to Romani settlements in Slovakia, McCann (Dancer, 2003, etc.) re-imagines the iconic Gypsy poet Papusza in the fictional guise of Zoli, whom we first meet at age six, fleeing with her grandfather, having narrowly escaped a Fascist pogrom in which their family and kumpanija (Gypsy band) died. Although reading and writing is forbidden for a Romani girl, Zoli learns in secret. Soon she is singing songs to her adopted kumpanija. The band survives WWII and is welcomed by the Slovakian Communist regime. At first, it appears that anti-Romani discrimination will end. Zoli is discovered by a poet, Stránský, and his English apprentice and translator, Swann, who edit a literary magazine and labor in a Bratislava printing plant. When they transcribe Zoli’s songs into poems and publish a chapbook, Zoli becomes a Socialist poster-poet, a sensation fêted on national tours. Tightly bound by her Romani roots, Zoli often retreats to her kumpanija’s encampment. When Swann follows her, they begin a clandestine affair, complicated by the Romani refusal to accept outsiders, or gadže). The regime changes and Stránský is tortured and shot. The government embarks on a campaign, called the Halt, of forced relocation of Gypsies to high-rise apartments. (To ensure cooperation, all their wagon wheels are burned.) Zoli’s popularity among gadže has incited distrust among her people. They blame her for the Halt, and administer the ultimate Gypsy punishment: She is declared unclean. The girl is subsequently banished and thereafter shunned by her people. She sneaks into Swann’s apartment and, in a gesture of despair and cynicism, steals his meager possessions. McCann artfully weaves Romani traditions, superstitions and expressions into a vibrant tableau, vividly rendering Zoli’s conflicting urges to flee and stay. After a tortuous journey, alone, on foot, across three countries, she is smuggled across the Alps into Italy, where she finally reconciles with her harshest persecutor, herself.
Mesmerizing.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-6372-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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