By no means the book it might have been. But Bezmozgis is a potent writer who may yet astonish us all.
A Russian Jewish family travels to America in decades following the Revolution that defined their patriarch’s life, in this grim first novel from the prize-winning Latvian-born author (Natasha and Other Stories, 2004).
The Krasnanskys—retired businessman Samuil, his stoical wife Emma, their married sons Karl and Alec, the latter’s spouses, and a pair of grandsons—make their way to Rome en route to Chicago. But the relative who was to have sponsored them must instead accommodate a black-sheep sibling, and the Krasnanskys decide to try their luck in Canada (“It’s more European than America, and more American than Europe”). The episodic narrative that develops from this compromise encompasses Samuil’s burden of memories, both proud and regretful (he never ceases mourning the disappearance of his brother Reuven, a more idealistic version of Samuil’s pragmatic self); the troublesome exigencies to which plodding Karl and self-absorbed, sensual Alec drive themselves; and the sorrows of Alec’s winsome, sensitive wife Polina, haunted by fallout from a lost love and an unwanted abortion. Bezmozgis creates a fascinating structure: Events occurring in the narrative present are juxtaposed with flashbacks to similar events which echo and illuminate them. But the resulting fullness gives an impression of redundancy and overemphasis, even when crucial distinctions are lucidly made. It all seems more like “the emigrant experience” than this family’s experience of emigration. And yet, the vividness of its characters and several superbly handled scenes, including a Rosh Hashanah pageant at which Polina endures painfully mixed emotions while watching other people’s children perform, and a brutally funny account of a scam involving stolen Russian ikons which climaxes in a chop shop, keep recalling the novel to vivid life. The result is a flawed, fascinating chronicle, reminiscent of another honorable failure about lives stolen, cast away and never fully recovered: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shadows on the Hudson (2008).
By no means the book it might have been. But Bezmozgis is a potent writer who may yet astonish us all.Pub Date: March 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-28140-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing...
Here’s a real find: a striking debut from an Afghan now living in the US. His passionate story of betrayal and redemption is framed by Afghanistan’s tragic recent past.
Moving back and forth between Afghanistan and California, and spanning almost 40 years, the story begins in Afghanistan in the tranquil 1960s. Our protagonist Amir is a child in Kabul. The most important people in his life are Baba and Hassan. Father Baba is a wealthy Pashtun merchant, a larger-than-life figure, fretting over his bookish weakling of a son (the mother died giving birth); Hassan is his sweet-natured playmate, son of their servant Ali and a Hazara. Pashtuns have always dominated and ridiculed Hazaras, so Amir can’t help teasing Hassan, even though the Hazara staunchly defends him against neighborhood bullies like the “sociopath” Assef. The day, in 1975, when 12-year-old Amir wins the annual kite-fighting tournament is the best and worst of his young life. He bonds with Baba at last but deserts Hassan when the latter is raped by Assef. And it gets worse. With the still-loyal Hassan a constant reminder of his guilt, Amir makes life impossible for him and Ali, ultimately forcing them to leave town. Fast forward to the Russian occupation, flight to America, life in the Afghan exile community in the Bay Area. Amir becomes a writer and marries a beautiful Afghan; Baba dies of cancer. Then, in 2001, the past comes roaring back. Rahim, Baba’s old business partner who knows all about Amir’s transgressions, calls from Pakistan. Hassan has been executed by the Taliban; his son, Sohrab, must be rescued. Will Amir wipe the slate clean? So he returns to the hell of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and reclaims Sohrab from a Taliban leader (none other than Assef) after a terrifying showdown. Amir brings the traumatized child back to California and a bittersweet ending.
Rather than settle for a coming-of-age or travails-of-immigrants story, Hosseini has folded them both into this searing spectacle of hard-won personal salvation. All this, and a rich slice of Afghan culture too: irresistible.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-245-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
SEEN & HEARD
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