Early experimentation by a gifted German voice.
Recent translation of a 1976 semi-fantastic novel by the late Becker (Jakob the Liar, 1996, etc.), a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who opted to stay in Germany after WWII.
Aron Blank “materializes” out of postwar Germany, having spent the war in a concentration camp. The war has effectively erased him. His internment has made a “blank” of him quite literally: he needs a new identity card even to exist. It’s not long before he’s set up with an apartment and a lover, Paula, who works for Rescue, an organization that reunites families displaced by the war. In short order, Rescue helps Aron locate his son, Mark, in Bavaria. Aron barely remembers the boy, and vice versa, and at the orphanage, where more than 200 children are housed Aron realizes that the director could simply decide which boy is his. Still, they find Mark, the awkwardness of the reunion passes, and the boy comes to live with Aron, and for a time it looks as if the war will have a kind of happy ending. Then Rescue finds Walter, Paula’s old beau. Aron sinks into despair as she leaves. He no longer works in the black market but turns to doing translation for Russian authorities, and soon he has a new love, Irma. As Mark grows up, he starts to show an interest in boxing—indeed, Aron was something of a boxer before the war. Time begins to pass quickly: Aron inherits $50,000 from a friend who dies in Baltimore; has a heart attack; divorces Irma; retires; and is left again with Mark as his only connection to the outside world. More interesting than the actual story is Becker’s narrative strategy: throughout, Aron is being interviewed by the novel’s journalist narrator; their conversations are a kind of continuous interruption reminding us that the story is as much about a writer’s relationship with his material as it is about Aron’s travails.
Early experimentation by a gifted German voice.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55970-615-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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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