Too bad the overly packed novel’s repetitiveness may lose some readers because Mazzantini’s depictions of love, maternal and...
The siege of Sarajevo is both subject and backdrop in this multilayered love story from Italian Mazzantini (Don’t Move, 2004, etc.).
Gemma leaves her comfortable apartment in Rome (and her understanding husband Giuliano) to visit Sarajevo with her son Pietro because an exhibit commemorating the siege will include photographs by Pietro’s father Diego. Sixteen years earlier, Gemma escaped war-torn Sarajevo with infant Pietro while Diego remained behind and later died. Now as middle-aged Gemma uses the visit to repair her relationship with Pietro, whose extreme adolescent disaffection has unnerved her, she also confronts her youthful past. Graduate student Gemma first met and fell in love with Diego, a bohemian photographer from Genoa, while visiting Sarajevo in the 1980s. Poet and Sarajevo tourist guide Gojko, himself more than half in love with Gemma, threw the two together. After many upheavals, including Gemma’s marriage and divorce from a conventional Roman businessman, the two lovers found passionate, if temporary happiness. They desperately wanted children, but Gemma learned she could not conceive, and Diego’s police record ruled out adoption as an option. They decided to look for a surrogate. While they were back in Sarajevo on what they thought would be a vacation, Gojko put them in touch with a young musician named Aska who wanted money to escape. Unfortunately, the unrest was beginning by then and the doctor they paid to implant the eggs disappeared. Gemma pushed Diego and Aska to conceive “naturally” but then was besieged by guilt and jealousy—just as Sarajevo was besieged and torn apart; Mazzantini brings the Bosnian civil war to violent life. Looking back, Gemma still wonders if she exchanged Diego for her baby. Only now, learning the truth of Pietro’s conception, does she begin to understand the full magnitude of loss that occurred, and the horror as well as the redemptive power of love.
Too bad the overly packed novel’s repetitiveness may lose some readers because Mazzantini’s depictions of love, maternal and romantic, are powerfully raw.Pub Date: May 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02268-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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