Berger also treats us to reflections on Borges (buried in Geneva), Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, the Cro-Magnon and nights of...
Discrete scenes from a mellow, largely autobiographical journey through time and space.
Barriers collapse as the past invades the present and the dead mingle with the living in this distinguished European’s latest fiction. European, yes, because Berger (The Shape of a Pocket, 2001, etc.), an expatriate Englishman long resident in France, has the appropriate historical consciousness and breadth of vision—his journey here includes stops in Lisbon, Geneva, Krakow, London and Madrid. But it’s the dead who make the story so singular, especially Berger’s mother, who shows up in Lisbon, out of the blue. In appearance an old woman (she’s been dead ten years), she speaks at times with the coquettish voice of a 17-year-old. She and Berger exchange memories while shopping in a beautifully evoked Lisbon. “I’ve learnt a lot since my death,” she says teasingly, and the idea that the dead have a better perspective than mere mortals seems self-evident. Berger’s father doesn’t appear in person, but the son recalls their contentious relationship, softened by Berger the child’s intuitive understanding of the WWI ghosts haunting his father, a former infantry officer. The dead are everywhere. In a Krakow marketplace, Berger finds Ken, his greatest childhood influence and passeur (guide), while down the staircase of a Madrid hotel comes another teacher, the intensely solitary Tyler. There are certain key concepts here: endurance is one, invincibility another. The closing section is given over to the living, as an old friend brings his bride to the family home in the Polish countryside. Berger does weddings well (see To The Wedding, 1995), but one misses the dead; nothing else quite equals that opening Lisbon section, the raillery of dead mother and living son, the powerful demonstration that “everything is a continuum.”
Berger also treats us to reflections on Borges (buried in Geneva), Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, the Cro-Magnon and nights of innocent, unconsummated passion with a fellow art student as the bombs fell over wartime London. His endless curiosity restores the spirits.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42336-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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