Painter-storyteller Ari's first novel is a true original, with roots in Jewish mysticism and Yiddish folklore: the picaresque tale of an 18th-century Polish shoemaker who follows his dreams no matter how grave or absurd they become. His parents' deaths in a Warsaw pogrom leave Meir at the mercy of his sister Yetta (who elopes as soon as he's old enough to fend for himself), his uncle Mottle, and Mottle's wife Flanka, a whirlwind cleaner obsessed by a mystic vision that commanded her simply, ``Boil!'' Betrothed by Rabbi Zaydle with the rabbi's servant Rachel- -it's a perfect match: she was orphaned in the same pogrom—Meir nonetheless gets the idea of leaving town to go seek the Baal Shem Tov, the revered mystical teacher of Medzhibozh. (Rachel's reaction to her departing fiancÇ: ``You're inventing your life. How exciting!'') Along the way there'll be run-ins with the fishmonger of Lublin, who'll answer any question if you buy a fish (``One fish, one question''); with the clay man of Pupekle, cursed, like Meir, by the divine brand that governs his movements; with Sarah, the candlemaker's daughter in Lvov who makes Meir forget about Rachel; and with Meir's crazy old sidekick Israel, who's convinced that he's invisible and that Meir's a shipmaker. It's clear what's going to happen when Meir finally meets the Baal Shem Tov, but Ari's bag of tricks and transformations is still bulging, as Mottle and his new wife turn into a tree, Luckshinkopf the fool wastes away ``until he falls entirely into the pail,'' and Meir, whose shoes for all his customers have increasingly shown minds of their own, passes the time after his return to Warsaw building a boat in the shape of a giant shoe. Extravagant, charming, and deeply serious in its matter-of-fact mingling of moral history, prophecy, and magic.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-939010-38-0
Page Count: 244
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
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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