A conceptual and engaging volume in the tradition of Eastern European masters.
Eleven dead bodies disrupt a foreign writer’s tedious life in Prague.
A lonely expat wanders the streets of Prague. His grasp of the Czech language is poor; he can communicate best with other Russian expats or in English, “the broken Latin of our times.” Working for an English-language newspaper covering local deaths or the art scene gives him a chance to observe his alien surroundings. The city and its inhabitants are gray and grim. And the surroundings are not the only monotony: the narrator is constantly finding himself confronted with corpses—11, in fact, as the title reports—and he is the only person observant enough to solve the mysteries of how they died. Kobrin’s 11 short stories, among his first to be published in America, each follow the same template. A corpse pops up, and in short order, the narrator must try to understand its circumstances. It might make sense to describe the collection as linked stories, but the book evades easy categorizations. The narrator may or may not be the same in each story, despite having overlapping names (sometimes), occupations (sometimes), and other identical details. But while the tales all follow the same formula, Kobrin’s book is still a page-turner. It’s the eclectic characters that inhabit each story that bring them to strange life—an installation artist who re-creates the scene of a school shooting in museum galleries, until the scene becomes all too real; a mall security guard who sees more than he should over the closed circuit television. Despite the book’s explicit nods to Doyle, Christie, and Sayers, though, readers expecting traditional whodunits will find instead morbid gems that ruminate as much on the cultural landscape of contemporary Eastern Europe as on the mystery at hand.
A conceptual and engaging volume in the tradition of Eastern European masters.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62897-134-7
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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