Revisionist memories that cheapen the historical record.
Meidav (The Far Field, 2001) crafts a loquacious first-person account by a French Nazi collaborator who makes a bizarre return to the locus of his early guilt and sin.
When he was the notorious prefect of Finier, France, Emile Poulquet signed away numberless Jews and others for deportation to the Nazi death camps. But by 1999, after decades of aliases, disguises and even facial surgery, the 84-year-old escape artist is no longer recognizable to the childhood friends who set him up in his police job at Finier, eventually bringing him to trial in Paris. They include his former secretary Odile, once in love with him; Izzy, the Jewish buddy Emile would not save from deportation; and his ultimate nemesis, Arianne, the girl who tortured him in boyhood for his ungainly facial hump, then grew up to become the woman he loved and lost to local Resistance hero Paul Fauret. Slipping back unnoticed into Finier, Emile admits that “survival had become less of a preference, mostly a habit.” He aims to track down Arianne and tender his last will and testament to her as a perverse revenge for holding him in emotional thrall all his life. She is now the head of the Society for the Restitution of Memory, which is staging a refugee demonstration in Finier, filmed by her American son Rick. Emile arrives just in time to catch Rick in a morally compromising situation, then falls in with a group of druggie wastrels. Inhabiting a makeshift forest “crawl space” with this ragtag gang, he revises the record of his past in chatty, bloated, egotistical prose. Troublingly, his actual “cooperation” with the Nazis is merely hinted at, and the overall details are as fuzzy as Meidav’s prose.
Revisionist memories that cheapen the historical record.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-13075-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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