Kostman, a licensed Big Apple locksmith, certainly gets around the city in the pursuit of his profession. In his debut as an author (no license required), he offers a view of a few of the people and sights glimpsed beyond the doors he unlocks. This slender volume is a compilation of the odd scenes Kostman has run into over the years and the peculiar dialogues in which he was a bemused participant. The slices of life are as abundant and fragrant as a Broadway deli's pastrami on rye. As he changes tumblers or replaces lost keys, the intrepid journeyman encounters human interest with a vengeance, from 11-year-old Gloria, who looks after her apparently senile Papi, to the aging Mrs. Herzog, who believes her sister is robbing her blind. Kostman releases those locked in and lets in those locked out (never, it seems, feeling the need to verify the customer's right of passage). Bedeviled by jammed doors are doctors and gypsies, musicians and welfare clients, a psychiatrist and an East Side matron who could use one, a clandestine fireworks dealer and a troupe of naked old men. All converse freely and at length with the compliant locksmith/scribe. They may live in the precincts of poverty or in areas of affluence- -with no relationship to willingness to pay the locksmith's fee— but most of the little dramas seem to happen in dark or dank places. ``The fish and piss odors produce an overpowering stench'' in one locale. ``At the bottom,'' in another, ``the alley is dark and everything is covered with bird shit.'' These are New York kinds of tales. Short stories by a locksmith with the key to a little Pandora's box of urban yarns. Written in the present tense with a touch of tense presence, the vignettes, while not earthshaking, provide salty, easy, lively city kibitzing.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-7894-2461-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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