Layered, nuanced, and deeply allusive; readers without a grounding in recent Balkans history may miss some of the clues. The...
An exiled scientist returns home to a country that has forgotten him. Or has it?
Odysseus wandered for years before arriving at Ithaca. Manu Traian has been away as long, having left his homeland before the Iron Curtain clanged shut. As this novel, the latest by the renowned Romanian writer Adamesteanu (Wasted Morning, 1983, etc.), opens, he is dreaming fitfully of running a gauntlet of officials demanding documents he cannot produce, then making his way, finally, to a place where he is now a ghost. It is a dream he has often. His name contains that of the Roman emperor Trajan, who conquered Romania, just as other names are suggestive of other times, other stories. Now that he is actually homeward bound, it’s the Securitate that means to conquer him, though, by ringing him with traps; invited to speak at a university, he flatters himself to think that his fame might be preceding him, without pausing to consider that the academics are implicated in the police state, as is everyone else. His German-born wife sees the danger clearly (“She knows it is too late to turn back. But she cannot stop herself from trying”), but he does not; his nephew, Daniel (think lion’s den), is perhaps the only innocent, but even he, the Telemachus of a book that resounds with allusions to and quotations from The Odyssey, is suspect. Even though there are hints everywhere that the Ceausescu regime is on its last legs, the police are vigilant enough to keep fat dossiers on everyone, from exiles to librarians (“It’s no accident that his daughter is called Mihaela, he says that he gave her this name in memory and honor of the last king of the former bourgeois-landowning Romania”). Still, in the end they have nothing to pin on Traian, who bungles through somehow—which is no guarantee of a happy ending.
Layered, nuanced, and deeply allusive; readers without a grounding in recent Balkans history may miss some of the clues. The meaning of the story is clear enough, though, even if parts are opaque.Pub Date: April 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56478-953-2
Page Count: 277
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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
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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