A bit labored and opaque, but atmospheric, increasingly engrossing and ultimately very rewarding.
The metaphor of espionage is put to good effect, in an intricate tale by German author Beyer.
The unnamed narrator here pieces together the complex history of his estranged grandfather’s life as part of a “game” he shares with the three cousins (actually, this only child’s de facto siblings) he grew up with in a small German village. Recurring flashbacks tell of a girl who forged a career as an opera singer, attracting the attention of a former childhood friend, who in 1936 flew secret Luftwaffe missions in support of besieged royalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. What the cousins learn—or think they learn—decades later is that their bereaved grandfather (the aforementioned pilot) took a second wife: a choleric “Old Lady” who undertook to destroy all her husband’s memories of his first wife and prevent any communication among him, his children and their children (i.e., the cousins). All this, and much more (including the real nature of their grandfather’s loss and grief), becomes clear only very gradually, as Beyer (The Karnau Tapes, 1997) circles around his story’s hidden core, moving backward and forward in several time periods and from one to another of his characters’ viewpoints. The children who seek to recover their own history thus become “spies” observing and speculating about their elders—as were the latter themselves, in circumstances shaped by both the wars of the 1930s and ’40s and by the exigencies of two destroyed marriages. Several recurring images (a peephole, a camera eye, “spores” floating in the air, a ceramic figure of a Spanish dancer, a model airplane, numerous mysterious family photographs) become clues to the mysteries that challenge the cousins—and the reader—until the story’s (quite nicely handled) climactic revelations.
A bit labored and opaque, but atmospheric, increasingly engrossing and ultimately very rewarding.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-100859-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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