Regrettable proof that love of language isn’t enough all by itself.
Dreary, unfocused tale of a part-Jewish Texas high-school football player named Hitler.
Second-novelist Estrin (Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, 2001) gives himself a heavy burden here by naming his protagonist Arnold Hitler, a burden that his light and fanciful prose has a difficult time bearing. The conceit is that an American soldier with the infamous last name serving in WWII accidentally wounds, rescues and ultimately marries a gorgeous half-Jewish Italian woman and brings her back to his home state of Texas, where they raise a son. Arnold grows up to be somewhat of a wonder, a prodigy in search of a vocation. He’s a chess whiz at the age of six, a star on the football field and publisher of a surprisingly widely read high-school newsletter on linguistic matters. The strikingly handsome Arnold gets his heart broken by a girl who goes away to Oberlin and becomes a radical feminist. He leaves Texas not long after for Harvard and an education in politics. Estrin at times seems to want Arnold to be his innocent traveling through history, growing up in a harshly racist town during the 1950s desegregation turmoil and then attending Harvard at the height of the Vietnam anti-war movement, all in the interest of educating him in the ways of the world—or words, in the case of the linguistically obsessed Arnold. But while the narrative’s sense of fancy takes it quite a ways (you don’t really notice that there’s no plot until about two hundred pages in), it can’t quite take this story to the finish line. Well before its conclusion, Arnold’s journey gets lost in a murk of semantic rhetoric and too much ado about very little that makes the author’s choice of a last name seem more of a gag than anything else. Even cameos by the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Noam Chomsky can’t quite bring this Candide home.
Regrettable proof that love of language isn’t enough all by itself.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-932961-03-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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