A deeply humane demonstration of wringing art from catastrophe.
A portrait of the small Polish town of Wlodawa during World War II, this collection of linked short stories is both moving and unsettling.
Shankman, the author of one previous novel (The Color of Light, 2013), brings Wlodawa to life through this set of stories told from different points of view. Like Joyce’s Dubliners, this book circles the same streets and encounters the same people as it depicts the horrors of Germany’s invasion of Poland through the microcosm of one village. The narration slips in and out of different characters’ minds, a reminder that there is no single story of the Holocaust—there are so many stories, so many points of view in just one little town. Shankman’s prose is inventive and taut; she writes of the “tea-with-milk color” of a boy’s skin and a young girl “watching the silvery bellies of enemy planes fly in tight formation overhead.” She also sneaks in a bit of magical realism in the forms of talking animals and mysterious, inexplicable natural disasters, suggesting the sheer kismet of surviving the war. Her writing is simple and matter-of-fact, never maudlin or sentimental. She describes the senseless humiliations and merciless killings of Wlodawa’s Jewish citizens bluntly, because that’s how they happened. Even so, the collection is bookended by stories told from the perspectives of Nazis; in both cases, the story’s protagonist is conflicted about his job. Shankman doesn’t let these figures off the hook for their deeds, however reluctantly performed, but her inclusion of these narrative voices alongside those of Jewish villagers displays both an aesthetic and a moral inquisitiveness. It also demonstrates how quickly and thoroughly war erases the will of the individual and how much easier it is to condemn a nation in abstract than any one person.
A deeply humane demonstration of wringing art from catastrophe.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1519-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
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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