A bulky, at times forbiddingly dour ground-level journey into Soviet-era deceits.
An epic study of one Bulgarian village’s travails during World War II and under Communist rule.
First published in 1986, Petrov’s novel circles around a group of men who, on Christmas Eve 1965, leave a bar to participate in a wolf hunt in a blizzard. The men have known each other for years and generally have reasons to resent each other, so the mix of bad weather, alcohol, and rifles is an ominous combination. But though the excursion has explosive and tragic consequences, Petrov works at a low boil, moving slowly (sometimes very slowly) through the men’s pasts. One has his wedding day ruined when one of the attendees publicly reveals that the bride is not a virgin; others are farmers strong-armed into taking part in a Soviet cooperative that mainly impoverishes them; a tubercular young man struggles to defend the honor of his brother-in-law and father-in-law, who both stand accused of treason. Translator Rodel keeps the prose clear and colloquial, but the avalanche of details about various families and their histories, delivered in lengthy paragraphs, is often dry. However, a central section centered on Ivan, the village artist and troublemaker, has a welcome liveliness: his interference in the marriage of a local couple blends the romance and danger of a love triangle with the political and financial struggles of getting ahead under communism. (The implication being that life under the co-op's strictures is a kind of cuckolding too.) Like most critiques of communism, the mood throughout the novel is melancholy, and the plot is rife with loss and heartbreak. “Everywhere there were wars, poverty and misery, treachery and lies, violence and slavery, joy and happiness,” one narrator intones near the end, which also captures the ratio of gloom to sunshine contained within.
A bulky, at times forbiddingly dour ground-level journey into Soviet-era deceits.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-914671-70-1
Page Count: 584
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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