A first novel revisits, over four generations, the exhaustively plumbed relationship between mothers and daughters who learn to accept each other only when it’s almost too late. Told against the background of recent Jewish history, the tale this time has several narrators. The strongest is 29-year-old Hannah Fried, a writing teacher and poet who, as she struggles to understand mother Celia’s increasingly bizarre treatment of her, tells her own as well the family’s story. That story is supplemented by contributions from Great-grandmothers Leah, who died in the Holocaust, and Channa, who emigrated from Russia; from Grandmother Ida in Cleveland; from Hannah’s own mother, Celia; and from such voices beyond the grave as Channa’s miscarried Vitl; and as Leo, a camp survivor who briefly dated Celia, then commuted suicide. These ghostly contributions serve mostly to describe the Holocaust and the fate of those family members who were unable to escape it. Until she was 20, Hannah and her mother were extremely close, but then abruptly Celia—who had divorced Hannah’s father Allan when Hannah was three and married gutless Norm—tells Hannah to move out of the house. For the next ten years, as she graduates, moves to Boston to write, teach, and eventually fall in love with Jonathan Lev, a photographer, Hannah struggles to understand Celia. She’s close to Grandmother Ida, but otherwise she spends a great deal of time thinking about her unhappiness. Her mother seems to have been abused by her own father, Moe, and then wounded by Leo’s suicide; so that, fearing her closeness to Hannah, she was driven to reject her. And yet Singer’s explanations for all her characters’ behaviors remain strained and schematic, though Hannah does eventually get through to Mom, who grudgingly suggests she can come back into her life—on her own terms, naturally. A novel written around an idea that, instead of liberating the tale’s possibilities, confines them like a kind of conceptual corset.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 1999
ISBN: 1-57322-147-3
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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
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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