Philosophical, provocative and nervy—an interior novel that manages to encompass a breadth of issues.
An Israeli leader confronts the man who sold him out to the KGB decades earlier in a striking exploration of memory, patriotism, faith and duplicity from Bezmozgis (The Free World, 2011, etc.).
As the novel opens, Baruch Kotler, a 60-something Russian-born Israeli politician, arrives in Yalta as damaged goods. His support of a Jewish settlement on disputed land has outraged the prime minister, one of whose lackeys attempts to blackmail him with photos of his young mistress. Refusing to back down, he pursues some peace and quiet with said mistress, Leora, in the run-down Crimean resort city he fondly recalls from childhood. (The novel is set in August, 2013, and none of the current political turmoil factors into the story.) The home the couple rents, however, is owned by Chaim Tankilevich, who years earlier reported the dissident Baruch to the authorities, leading to a 13-year gulag sentence. If the coincidence seems impossibly unrealistic, the conversations between the two men, and the depth of thought and feeling Bezmozgis brings to them, redeem any such concerns. Chaim has lived on the edge of poverty ever since his betrayal, while Baruch has come away from his ordeal a political celebrity hardly wounded by his affair with Leora. Who deserves esteem or contempt here? Who merits punishment? The debate between the two men is a nakedly allegorical one, connected to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that lays a scrim over the entire narrative. (Baruch’s son is an Israeli soldier with orders to help clear the settlement.) Taking place over the course of one day, the novel offers no pat resolutions to entrenched arguments. But it gains a satisfying tension from its compression, of two men forced to settle accounts in some way about their past in a culture thick with long memories.
Philosophical, provocative and nervy—an interior novel that manages to encompass a breadth of issues.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-28433-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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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