An impassioned exploration of how the past erupts into the present and continues to shape our personalities and our fates.
Leisurely paced, intensely focused tale of collusion and intrigue, spotlighting Colombia’s German community before, during and after World War II.
In 1988, journalist Gabriel Santoro published A Life in Exile, the story of a Jewish refugee who fled to Colombia in the years preceding the war. Gabriel wrote the book, he tells us, to give some perspective on the struggles of such emigrants. His motives didn’t impress his father, also named Gabriel, a leading intellectual in Bogotá with a particular contempt for the shallowness and ephemerality of journalism. Father wrote a scathing review of the book that went far beyond the bounds of necessity or good taste and raised questions about his psychological need to make such an extreme condemnation. Perhaps he has something to hide? When he phones his son three years later, in the novel’s opening pages, is he trying to make amends? Several other events, past and present, conspire to pique the journalist’s curiosity. Why did Konrad Deresser, another member of the German-Colombian community, commit suicide shortly after the war when his son Enrique denounced him as a collaborator? Is the 1991 death of Santoro père in a car crash really an accident? Along the way we meet a range of characters, some well integrated into Colombian culture despite their German roots, others more blatant and unabashed about their support for Hitler’s policies even after the war. With both journalistic and personal reasons to pursue the truth, the younger Santoro tracks down Enrique, though he first has to endure the opprobrium of Enrique’s son Sergio, as well as Angelina, the older Gabriel’s mistress and perhaps betrayer.
An impassioned exploration of how the past erupts into the present and continues to shape our personalities and our fates.Pub Date: July 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59448-878-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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
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
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