As fascinating and tangled as an old woman’s fireside reminiscences: a jumbled mosaic of memories folded into the history of...
A wide-ranging portrait of Soviet and pre-Soviet society and history as seen by an elderly matriarch living on the shores of the Crimean Sea. The second English-language appearance from the celebrated Russian geneticist-turned-novelist (The Funeral Party, 2001).
Although it weighs in at just over 300 pages, the story has a Tolstoyan heft to it, not only in its seriousness but in the dizzying array of characters who wander in and out. The heart of the tale is Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez, now (in the 1970s) a widow of more than 20 years. Born in the 1890s to a Greek family that had settled many generations earlier in a Crimean village, Medea was a freethinking young woman who became enamored of Communism long before the 1917 revolution. Her late husband Samuel Mendez, a Jew who became one of the first Party members in Russia, was an officer in a special detachment of the Red Army. Although he left Medea childless, she had a large extended family and many friends, and her house on the Crimean is always crowded now with visitors during the summer holiday season. There is Medea’s childhood playmate Elena, who married Medea’s brother: She came from a wealthy Armenian family, and her father supported Medea and her 12 brothers and sisters after both of their parents died young. Elena’s son Georgii is also a summer visitor. Then there is Medea’s younger sister Alexandra, who married Ivan Isaevich and had a daughter they named Nike, a great favorite of Medea’s. Nike is inseparable from her childhood friend Masha, who grew up to marry Valerii Butonov, a famous athlete and circus performer who became a physician. This is a story of recollection, unfolding backwards as the arrival of Medea’s guests recalls events long past but far from forgotten.
As fascinating and tangled as an old woman’s fireside reminiscences: a jumbled mosaic of memories folded into the history of an age—striking, but badly out of focus.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-8052-4196-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
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