The book is also full of the facile asides and riffs for which Jacobson has been praised and spanked—comic patter that pales...
A novelization of The Merchant of Venice set in contemporary England touches on foreskins, art collectors, athletes, and troublesome daughters.
This is Man Booker Prize winner Jacobson’s (J, 2014, etc.) contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series in which writers are asked to reimagine one of the plays. He opens in a cemetery where a wealthy Jewish art collector named Strulovitch is visiting his late mother and pondering the latest misadventure of his teenage daughter, Beatrice. Nearby, reading to his buried wife from Portnoy’s Complaint, stands Shylock, transported (by Tardis?) from a script written under Elizabeth I to pages in the reign of QE II. The father of the play’s rebellious Jessica agrees to be a houseguest of Strulovitch, which allows the men to wax angry and eloquent on obstreperous offspring, anti-Semitism, and, ultimately, what penalty one can exact from the randy Christian jock with whom Beatrice has run off. Playing Antonio and middleman between father and daughter is an obnoxious aesthete named D’Anton with whom Strulovitch has clashed over a Jewish art museum. D’Anton’s partner in crude anti-Semitism is an inane version of Portia as wealthy socialite with a TV show in which she serves food and renders Judge Judy–type dispute resolutions. The legal gotcha here is supplied by Shylock, as both adviser and doppelgänger to Strulovitch, who is pondering a different pound of flesh. The Merchant is well-suited to Jacobson, a Philip Roth–like British writer known for his sterling prose and Jewish themes. It’s hard to say whether his novel stands well on its own, as the play permeates it with quotes, characters, allusions, plot elements, and that touch of magical realism that imports every pound of Shylock in the fictional flesh.
The book is also full of the facile asides and riffs for which Jacobson has been praised and spanked—comic patter that pales amid the fine, thoughtful talk when his two heroes hold forth in this uneven effort.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4132-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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
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