Like so much of its subject’s work, a chronicle of the progression from youthful romanticism to middle-aged disillusionment,...
The French master receives serviceable though not sterling biographical treatment from a translator of Flaubert’s works for Penguin Classics.
Everything about Gustave Flaubert (1821–80) was outsized: roaring voice, whoring, debts, and, most important, literary ambitions. The latter were nourished secretly while he was an indifferent law student (a period likely ended by an epileptic attack), then brought to fruition in a small but painstakingly written corpus of four novels, three short stories, and an abortive attempt at a play. The son and brother of surgeons, he used his pen like a scalpel to anatomize the stultifying provincial bourgeoisie in his masterpiece, Madame Bovary. (Ironically, he avoided Parisian mistress Louise Colet by pleading the need to stay in the provinces to care for his widowed mother and orphaned niece, admitting that he was temperamentally incapable of committing to anything but intellectual freedom.) While not as spectacularly self-destructive as other writers, Flaubert offers a dazzling prospect for a literary biographer: complex, divided personality; battles against epilepsy and syphilis, censorship, penury, and self-doubt; and a vast archive of Waspish, self-pitying, often erotic letters. Wall (Univ. of York) doesn’t drop his opportunity, but he doesn’t exploit its grand possibilities. To his credit, the biographer sometimes offers piercing insights into Flaubert’s methods and themes, noting, for instance, that Madame Bovary represented a “dynamic form of self-multiplication” in which the author’s personality permeated all of his characters. But he does not deal as trenchantly as Herbert Lottman’s Flaubert (1989) with the novelist’s friendships with Turgenev, Maupassant, George Sand, boon-companion Louis Bouilhet, and editor Maxime du Camp. Moreover, Wall could have taken a cue from Flaubert’s restrained style to prune his own melodramatic excess (the affair with Colet was “an ideally imaginative, superstitious, ceremonious, frustrated love”).
Like so much of its subject’s work, a chronicle of the progression from youthful romanticism to middle-aged disillusionment, but narrated without Flaubert’s style and bent for psychological realism. (30 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-15627-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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