A lovely book that deserves comparison with Giovanni Guareschi’s portrayal of country priest Don Camillo and J.F. Powers’s...
The life of a Manhattan Catholic parish throughout the 1930s and after is lovingly etched in this posthumously published semi-autobiographical novel.
At its center is a rich characterization of Friar Benigno (born Joseph Zoller), a priest at St. Ansgar’s (located in a West Side “Dutchie” neighborhood) who’s being honored for 60 years of service. Nielsen (a television producer, actor and author of two pseudonymously published earlier novels) sticks close to the viewpoint of Mario, the adoring kid who serves as Friar Benigno’s altar boy and “assistant,” protégé and sounding-board, and recipient of both Benigno’s hard-won wisdom and his down-to-earth stories—rendered in a delightful, ethnically inflected fractured English (e.g., “St. Francis he don’t move uptown like the rich people. . . . He don’t rob and steal and crook”). Benigno’s firm adherence to the virtues (of poverty, chastity and obedience), preached by his beloved Francis of Assisi, see him—and Mario—through such crises as the debate over whether to pray for the soul of a deceased “gangster”; mourning a presumed suicide who may in fact have only fled from his black-widow fiancée; dealing with Father Blaise (who plays organ too loudly for the choir’s liking), handsome Father Roland (who attracts previously irreligious female communicants) and efficiency-expert martinet Father Guardianus; and—in the novel’s best episode—dealing with the stoical grief of Tommy Hunding, a devoted caregiver to his younger brothers, even after one of them, a heartless drunk, marries Tommy’s girlfriend. These often very funny episodes are moderated beautifully by Mario’s confusion over whether to enter the priesthood or serve his country by fighting against Hitler, as well as the choice he makes, the ordeal he endures and the comfortingly familiar “miracle” that resolves his dilemma.
A lovely book that deserves comparison with Giovanni Guareschi’s portrayal of country priest Don Camillo and J.F. Powers’s memorable tales of fallibly human clerics. Arguably, in fact, a minor classic.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-58642-100-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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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