Wilmer and Gömöri’s translation brings a sharpness and energy to these poems, and Wilmer’s introductory essay (along with...
This collection provides both an introduction to and an overview of one of modern Hungary’s most original poets. Born in 1943, Petri is from the literary generation that followed Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub. He entered the world during a stormy political era: by 1948 Soviet Communism was firmly entrenched and Hungary had entered a long dark period. The uprisings of 1956 brought a short-lived euphoria, only to be followed by 33 years of “goulash communism” under János Kádár. Although the Kádár regime brought superficial prosperity to Hungary, Petri loathed its hypocrisies and retaliated against it by issuing his 1982 and 1985 collections in samizdat. By the time Hungary was finally able to hold free general elections in 1990, Petri had matured into a sharply observant, acerbic, satirical writer, informed, but by no means limited, by politics. His lyric gift is evident in every poem, and his wry perspective is drawn from the depths of the human condition. In “The Nothing Going On,” after describing many random particulars (“Sunshine, leaves rustling, a light breeze”), he wonders “Isn’t what is / enough: the nothing that goes on?” And in “Christmas 1956” he recalls life from the perspective of a child: “the kitchen is filling up / with family, and it’s just as an observer / dropped in the wrong place that I am here: / small, alien, and gone cold.”
Wilmer and Gömöri’s translation brings a sharpness and energy to these poems, and Wilmer’s introductory essay (along with the forward by Elaine Feinstein) provides much helpful background information. This is the kind of writing Americans would do well to read—and learn from.Pub Date: April 14, 2000
ISBN: 1-85224-504-2
Page Count: 96
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
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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