Set against the complex, turbulent political and cultural tableau of central Europe, Pehe’s sweeping novel confronts the...
An expansive, multigenerational novel about Western Europe that takes on the big questions.
Besides being a novelist, Pehe is a political analyst and was an adviser to Czech President Václav Havel. This is the second novel in an ambitious trilogy, the first to be translated into English (by Turner). In Wim Wenders’ acclaimed film Wings of Desire, set in West Berlin, unseen angels watch over their human charges. Here, an angel, Ariel, visits three generations of a Czech family, the Brehmes, from the late 19th century to the early 21st. Pehe’s wide-ranging story touches on two world wars, the Holocaust, Soviet expansionism and its demise, ending in New York City on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. In the first part, Ariel instructs Joseph Brehme to write a long letter to his mother, who abandoned him when he was 6. It’s 1940; he’s 40 years old. We learn he grew up in “two linguistic worlds” (Czech/German) and studied music and violin in the bustling, creative Prague of Jaroslav Hašek, Max Brod, and Alfons Mucha. He fought in a Czech brigade in 1914 and lost two fingers. Part 2 opens in 1968 during the Prague Spring. Hanna, Joseph’s daughter, is confined to a psychiatric hospital. Under Ariel’s influence, she takes pen to paper to tell her harrowing story of being taken in by Jewish grandparents and hiding to escape the German occupation of Prague. As Hanna writes, “I must…most of all try to explain it.” Her section is highly affecting and well-drawn. The third part, weakest of the three, opens in 2001. Hanna’s son, Alex, a famous, disillusioned American professor, feels Ariel’s influence in the guise of his girlfriend, Leira. His diary completes Pehe’s powerful saga of this Czech family.
Set against the complex, turbulent political and cultural tableau of central Europe, Pehe’s sweeping novel confronts the existential questions concerning God’s existence and man’s brutality to man.Pub Date: Dec. 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9568890-4-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Jantar Publishing/Dufour
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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