The combination of empathy and distance suits the form of the fable well, allowing Davys to meditate on the nature of sin...
Pseudonymous Swedish novelist Davys ups the ante in Mollisan Town, his world of dead-serious stuffed animals (Amberville, 2009), by introducing a stuffed messiah.
Composer Reuben Walrus has been diagnosed with Drexler’s syndrome, which means he’s got three more weeks of hearing left. How will he ever finish his Symphony in A minor? There’s only one way, he decides: He’s got to track down the mysterious healer Maximilian, who’s been credited with some truly miraculous cures. As Reuben gets closer to his hoped-for savior—hiring small-time private eye Philip Mouse, locating Maximilian’s associates and beneficiaries of his healing, repeatedly getting the brush-off because his urgent pleas are so transparently selfish—Wolf Diaz, Maximilian’s childhood friend and amanuensis, presents an interspersed back story relating his companion’s early years. Set apart from the time he first arrived in Das Vorschutz and claimed by the childless Eva Whippoorwill and Sven Beaver, despite his lack of definite resemblance to any particular species of stuffed animal and his disquieting tendency to grow larger, Maximilian presents numerous parallels with the life of Christ. He impresses his elders with his fondness for obscure parables, befriends criminals, outrages civil authorities and lands in prison even as his fame is spread by a burgeoning number of followers. For a while it seems as if Reuben will never achieve the meeting he longs for, and when he finally does, courtesy of some unexpected twists and a magical final scene, it doesn’t exactly go the way he planned. As in most modern animal fables since Orwell, Davys’s stuffed citizens never seem to have a fully realized independent existence—despite a couple of touching asides, e.g., “The last thing to leave a stuffed animal is hope, it is often said”—yet they don’t quite seem like people either.
The combination of empathy and distance suits the form of the fable well, allowing Davys to meditate on the nature of sin and redemption from an appealingly fresh perspective.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-179743-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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