A subtle, nuanced take on one apparently selfish woman and the difficult choices she makes.
A woman describes her life in the Soviet Union.
Maya is a self-aggrandizing woman, not at all self-aware. She’s the narrator of Khemlin’s (The Investigator, 2015) stunning novel, and a thoroughly misleading narrator at that. But first the facts: Maya is Jewish, a teenager during World War II. She grows up in Ostyor, a small village outside Kiev. Her father dies in the war, and Maya and her mother move to Kiev. This is mostly background; in her narrative, Maya doesn’t dwell long on the war, and instead, the book gets going as she woos her first husband. By the book’s end, she’ll have had several, each one an upgrade on the last. With each transition, Maya’s living quarters get bigger. The machinations she enacts to acquire a better apartment might be confusing to readers not already familiar with Soviet housing practices. What’s clear, though, is the exquisite depth of Maya’s character. It’s easy, at first, to judge her for her materialism. But as Lara Vapnyar points out in her introduction, Maya’s childhood home was destroyed by German soldiers. Her selfishness—or what seems to be selfishness—takes on a slightly different hue when considered against the trauma she survived. But perhaps the finest aspect of this very fine novel is the language Maya uses to relate her experiences. That language is an odd blend of institutionalized jargon, Soviet cliché, and florid prose. “As a pedagogue,” she says at one point, “I worried very much about the absence of established contact.” At another point, she claims that “my soul had gradually begun begging for a holiday filled with new sensations.” The result is somehow both funny and enraging, moving and deeply felt. By the end, you’re filled with sympathy not only for all the characters that Maya has wronged, but also for Maya herself—flawed as she is.
A subtle, nuanced take on one apparently selfish woman and the difficult choices she makes.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-231-18237-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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
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