Taken together, the stories make a worthy addition to the archive of great Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries,...
From Russia, with love (and unfulfilled yearning, crushing despair and profound heartache).
Bunin, now forgotten by all but a handful of specialists, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1933. A successful and well-respected writer in Russia, he settled in Paris after the Revolution, where he maintained himself by writing about a culture that had virtually disappeared by the time he got to France. The six stories collected here were written between 1900 and 1944. All are set in either a fiercely cosmopolitan Moscow or a tenderly bucolic Russian countryside. A few, like the eponymous “The Elagin Affair” and “Mitya’s Love,” are long enough to count as novellas; others seem, in comparison, like sketches. Bunin’s greatest strength is his ability to focus intensely on the consciousness of a single character. His stories, packed with sensory information and grounded by long, clause-heavy descriptions, work to find the mysterious moment at which objective reality becomes part of the interior world. Some stories, like “Mitya’s Love,” spend paragraph after lavish paragraph on minute sensory experiences—the thick air of the country on a languorous afternoon, the sound of a woman’s laugh, the long wait for a short letter. But many of the stories promise a bigger payoff than they can deliver. Bunin’s prose is always stronger than the stories’ plots, which often seem to end rather abruptly, often by introducing a relatively clichéd and unsatisfying convention more indebted to melodrama than to the 19th-century realists he otherwise resembles.
Taken together, the stories make a worthy addition to the archive of great Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, even if individually, their prose spills over the narrow confines of Bunin’s plots.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2005
ISBN: 1-56663-641-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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