A search for the painful and awkward wellsprings of the novelistic imagination.
In Croatian novelist Novak's English-language debut, a young novelist is forced to confront the terrible moment in his childhood when his career as a fable-maker began, not by choice but by necessity.
Matija is a writer with two well-received novels behind him, but he's been floundering for more than a year now on a follow-up, and one by one his trusted readers are confirming what he has suspected: It's going nowhere. Meanwhile, Matija's girlfriend, Dina, with whom he's been happy, issues an ultimatum: He has to keep his inventions confined to fiction, has to stop being so deceitful—or is it just evasive?—about his childhood. As a test, Dina brings several old photos for him to explicate. Matija does so, at length and feelingly, before Dina tearfully informs him that the photos are fakes; she has doctored them herself, and they have nothing to do with him. After Dina dumps him, Matija reluctantly decides to revisit an epoch he has utterly expunged from memory—the years before, at age 7, he and his family left their village in Međimurje for Zagreb at the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars in 1991. Coming to grips with that past requires him to excavate the lonely, awful, bewildering period immediately after his father's death, a stretch whose agonies culminated in an epidemic of eight suicides in Matija's village. That suicide cluster attracted attention not only to the village, but to a particular little boy, in the research called M.D., who knew all the victims and who was thought by some (perhaps including himself) to be obscurely responsible. Novak captures well the way that grief may isolate, dislocate, and unmoor the bereaved, especially if it's a child left largely to fend for himself. The boy Matija wanders the countryside looking for his dead father and trying to negotiate for his return—from the police, from the land itself, and from the folkloric "will-o'-the-wisps" who inhabit the region.
A search for the painful and awkward wellsprings of the novelistic imagination.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1610-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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