A gripping and sensitive portrait of ordinary people wrestling with ideological passions.
Homophobic politics meshes with a woman’s memory of the Holocaust in this debut novel dealing with moral panic.
In 2009, Ludka Zeilonka, an octogenarian art professor in Hampshire, Massachusetts, looks back on a past packed with tragedy and intrigue. As a Polish Roman Catholic in the anti-Nazi underground during World War II, she spirited Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, one of whom, Izaak, became her husband. She’s still carrying a torch for her lost wartime lover Oskar and hiding a famous portrait of Chopin that she smuggled out of the country. A new season of persecution erupts around her when her gay grandson, Tommy, is fired from his high school teaching position for assigning gay-themed literature to his Advanced Placement English class. The action is part of a homophobic campaign ginned up by the fundamentalist Redeemer Fellowship Church and its studiedly avuncular pastor, Royce Leonard, along with his followers in the state legislature and on the school board. The furor embroils Tommy’s father, a powerful state senator estranged from his family by his relentless political calculations, and escalates as the teacher is savagely beaten and Ludka and Izaak face harassing phone calls and bricks through their windows. Meanwhile, Oskar’s grandson contacts Ludka, raising her hopes of a reunion but also threatening to expose her for art theft. The politics of Dempsey’s saga don’t ring very true: it’s hard to imagine anti-gay pogroms gaining traction in modern-day liberal Massachusetts, and the insistent comparison with the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto is heavy-handed. Fortunately, Dempsey treats the human dimension of her story with nuance and skill. She crafts complex, compelling characters on all sides, including a conservative talk radio host who supports Leonard’s campaign but is troubled by the ensuing violence and delves into the sense of grievance among Christians who feel oppressed by, well, having to read gay-themed literature. She grounds the narrative in evocative prose that conveys mood and psychology through realistic, precisely observed details—“She rose, took a healthy swallow of vodka to ballast herself, then tried to ignore the way the tumbler wobbled as she lowered it to the side table”—and makes a potentially melodramatic tale feel absorbing and real.
A gripping and sensitive portrait of ordinary people wrestling with ideological passions.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-308-3
Page Count: 399
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
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