The idea behind Ozick's short allegory is electric, arcing across the spaces between literature and salvation—but at such curt length, and so jammed, that the execution is staticky. Lars Andemening is the third-string book reviewer (the one who does "serious" books by European writers no one has much heard of) on an itself less-than-leading Stockholm daily. Divorced twice, Lars doesn't especially care about his lack of status, though; in private he has something more nourishing, i.e., the absolute conviction that he is the son of the Jewish Polish genius Bruno Schulz, tragically killed in the streets of his small Polish town by the S.S. So intent is he on seeing through his putative father's eyes that Lars has arranged to learn Polish so he can savor in the original the two extant short collections Schulz left. . .and dream in fidelity at least about the "lost" last work, The Messiah. Then one day Lars gets a message—from an old woman, a bookseller who's been his chief confidante concerning his self-assumed identity—that his sister is in Stockholm. He hates to believe that a sister even exists; and worse, when he meets the woman, she has brought along a manuscript stored in an amphora, claiming (as does the bookseller's husband, a Dr. Eklund, a shadowy expert in provenances) that it is The Messiah! Lars ultimately and violently does far worse than reject the woman and the manuscript. . .which is at about the point when a chill runs down a reader's spine: the title of the lost Schulz book in this context is no accident—and how will the imagination, when the time comes, react to real redemption? The most Jamesian of Ozick's very Master-imbued works, the novella's conceptual frame is clean, polished, and startling. Yet the actual prose is frantically busy; the dialogue is hyperbolic, tuned to an impossibly high, brassy pitch; and the allegory doesn't get enough space to insinuate, to slink in—it comes at you like a cuffing instead. Great fables, Schulz's themselves a prime example, at first wear a fake coat of innocence—yet Ozick seems not to have the patience for that: wanting the allegory to be morally indelible, it bursts toward us flood-like, and the result is smear. Challenging but twitchy work by one of our most remarkable stylists.
Pub Date: March 10, 1987
ISBN: 0394756940
Page Count: 141
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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