A beautifully imagined and deeply moving portrayal of temporal and spiritual conflict and crisis, from the ever-improving Czech author of such compelling fictions as Love and Garbage (1991) and Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light (1995). Kl°ma's subject here is Reverend Daniel Vedra, a faithful minister to his varied congregation (which includes the prisoner he dutifully counsels) and a devoted husband and father to his family of four. But Daniel harbors a guilty secret: his ``inability to be intimate,'' to share his inmost feelings, with his plain, submissive second wife Hana; for, as Hana knows all too well, ``his heart belonged to the one who had died.'' Memories of his beautiful first wife Jitka, a cancer victim, indeed preclude Daniel's full involvement in the lives he pretends to share—until he is pursued by a seductive parishioner, a married woman resembling Jitka, and persuades himself that consenting to love is the greatest good he can do. Kl°ma examines this seemingly familiar story from a fascinating variety of perspectives, including Daniel's tortured diary entries and evasive exchanges of letters with correspondents and confidants past and present—and also focuses on Hana's quiet acceptance of her husband's distance as well as on her own reluctant (and innocent) friendship with Matou Volek, a gifted linguist scarred by a combative marriage and attracted by Hana's very placidity. What makes this novel so absorbing, and so painful, is Kl°ma's intense concentration on his characters' perturbed and perversely resourceful moral natures; their desperate self- justifying, and ultimate surrender to the consequences of their actions. A work of great analytical power that transforms discourse and thought into harrowing drama. Kl°ma's best yet.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8021-1625-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
IN THE NEWS
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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