An uneven story anchored by a memorable protagonist.
A Florida transplant from Eastern Europe meditates on life and love.
Ludmila, “bar philosopher extraordinaire,” is a middle-aged immigrant helping her lover, Leo, run a strip club in Tampa. When an unnamed patron keeps returning to the club, she regales him with her colorful life story. Like a 21st-century Scheherazade, she interweaves tales of lovers she’s had throughout her life in America, from Larry, the abusive man with whom she has her only child, to Daniel, whom she marries illegally in Mexico to help him collect wedding gifts. (It's in this period she earns the nickname Worthy, an ironic nod to her ability for petty grift.) But her great love is Theodore, a literature professor who, under the guidance of four novels by Mann, Nabokov, Camus, and Melville, leads Worthy into a life of scamming and con jobs, which they perform good-naturedly all over the world. In her debut novel, Birnbaum has created a glorious and frustrating character in Worthy. Readers’ tolerance for her will likely depend on their stamina for the long stretches of broken English and difficult syntax she uses as a non-native speaker. Combined with her penchant for philosophizing, this can make for knotty, though realistic, reading. Similarly, Worthy’s oral history is perhaps too beholden to verisimilitude: although she keeps her anonymous listener hooked with the promise of resolving the story of her great love affair with Theodore, the climax, when it comes, gets little attention in favor of the lessons she learns. But the lessons are always moving: “May I live on earth, we don’t ask before we are born, but we are here without asking and we could give something, be worthy, even if no mark will stay after.”
An uneven story anchored by a memorable protagonist.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-938103-48-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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