Perhaps the fullest fictional treatment yet of the European intellectual’s flight from Hitler’s Germany—to safety, and,...
A family of German Jewish refugees, the orphaned girl who becomes their servant, and the troubled son of a children’s author coexist uneasily in Ozick’s fifth novel (The Puttermesser Papers, 1997, etc.).
In one of its matching narratives, young Rose Meadows, alone after the death of her vain, underachieving father, is hired by Professor Rudolf Mitwisser as nanny and housemaid to his listless wife Elsa and their five children. But the Mitwissers are as impecunious as they are imperious and dictatorial. No salary is forthcoming, and Rose soon learns that Mitwisser’s arcane researches into the history of an obscure “heretical” Jewish sect (the Karaites), opposed to rabbinical interpretation of scripture, have earned him only a materially unrewarding academic sinecure. Rose also discovers the connection between the Mitwissers and chronic itinerant James A’bair, whose own narrative discloses the commercial success of his father’s beloved creation the “Bear Boy,” his lifelong attempts to escape the prisons of family fame and wealth, and his serendipitous acquaintance with the Mitwissers—resulting both in his generosity to them and his “theft” of their teenaged daughter Anneliese. Ozick delineates with passion and precision Rose’s immersion in the “glimmering world” of intellectual preoccupation that her employers do and do not incarnate, resisting the pull of the prewar outside world—deftly represented by Rose’s importunate “cousin” Bertram and his beloved, a fiery radical self-named “Ninel (“Lenin” spelled backwards). The thematic and narrative content here are almost forbiddingly rich and do slow the action. But the characterizations are acute—notably that of matriarch Elsa, once a distinguished scientist and a former colleague and intimate of Nobel-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger (who may be her eldest child’s father), sunk in a slough of disorientation and depression.
Perhaps the fullest fictional treatment yet of the European intellectual’s flight from Hitler’s Germany—to safety, and, ironically, to inconsequence—in America. One of Ozick’s most interesting and challenging books.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-47049-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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