Full of wit and mystery. Memorable and sure to be one of the big novels of the season.
A charged philosophical novel that ranges across centuries to examine where things went wrong (and sometimes right) in history for the Jews, from the heyday of Moorish Iberia to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
“Our family originated in a mystery and a miracle before almost any of the European nations were created, and we’ve played a significant role in history without feeling arrogant about the secret knowledge...that we bore with us through various ages and lands.” Our narrator relates a millennium’s worth of tales surrounding that “secret knowledge,” namely the means to stay alive forever. Other alchemical talents include potions of various sorts, including one to fend off treason, another concoction that would find favor in the courts of Europe, where some member of the Spinoza family or another, Zelig-like, is always present. (The omnipresence of figures such as “the Cabalist” has a sharp point.) A best-seller in its birthplace of Norway, publisher and literary critic Gleichmann’s novel opens with a dying mother’s plaintive remembrance of a blameless young boy’s death at the hands of the Nazi occupiers of Oslo; it closes with an evocation of that sad young man, raised in the voice of our narrator, who is threatened with the very loss of that voice. He, like all in his lineage, has a gift of “embellishing the ugly and making the fleeting moment eternal.” But can that gift save them? Can they spin the gold of immortality for themselves as well? In a sprawling saga that embraces the likes of the storied kings of Castile and the philosopher Voltaire, Gleichmann has obvious good fun in exploring the implications, as well as the Big Questions, chief among them, “how God could allow such a thing.”
Full of wit and mystery. Memorable and sure to be one of the big novels of the season.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59051-589-1
Page Count: 800
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
