None of the sentiments here ring true; worse, the carefully described clothes sound dated and drab.
Debut novelist Oberbeck takes fashion ever-so-seriously in this painfully earnest romance about a dressmaking genius who falls in love with a client who becomes his muse.
In a quiet village just outside Paris, Claude Reynaud carries on his family’s tailoring tradition, his routine enlivened by after-school visits from his three nephews. A talented dressmaker in his 40s, Claude has begun to develop a clientele of Parisian society women. One day he is hired to design the wedding dress for Valentine de Verlay, a beautiful young woman with perfect proportions and a swan neck (think Audrey Hepburn). Claude, whose wife Rose-Marie deserted him eight years earlier, is immediately smitten. And for no reason apparent to the reader, Valentine seems attracted to mousy Claude. Valentine and Claude steal a kiss at her engagement party. Then, at a rendezvous at a lake resort, they have sex so gauzy it seems downright chaste. Although Valentine claims she is drawn to Claude, when her fiancé, the loutish Victor, loses his job, she decides her duty is to marry him. Meanwhile, Claude is hired by a big fashion house in Paris, where he becomes the toast of the town based largely on his design for Valentine’s wedding dress. Having heard of his growing success, the avaricious Rose-Marie reclaims her place as his wife until Claude bribes her into a divorce. Valentine, now married and pregnant, moves with Victor to New York. Soon Claude travels there to see the spring fashion shows and of course runs into Valentine. Victor has become a drunken bully. After he hits Claude in a jealous rage, Claude realizes he has no future with Valentine. He returns to Paris and, after a chapter of gratuitous tragedy, takes up his life of design with new resolve.
None of the sentiments here ring true; worse, the carefully described clothes sound dated and drab.Pub Date: July 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-8033-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
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
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