Sugary but far from insubstantial: a definitive portrait of an era that’s all the better for not really trying to be one.
The yuppies are coming! Kurlansky, tackler of seemingly any nonfiction subject (Choice Cuts, 2002; 1968, 2004, etc.), distills his many passions into his first novel.
It’s the 1980s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (before it was called the East Village, Alphabet City, or other real-estate-provided monikers), and Nathan Seltzer doesn’t want to sell out. He runs a copy shop in a building owned by his parents, with whom Nathan, his wife, and young daughter make up one of the neighborhood’s last old Jewish families. A copy chain is eyeing Nathan’s store, offering a cool half-million for it even as the area’s diverse hullabaloo is giving way to the first colonizing elements of gentrification. This is Nathan’s first dilemma. His second is his affair with Karoline, the frumpy-looking but suspiciously sexy daughter of the German owners of the Edelweiss Bakery, whom Nathan’s uncle Nusan (a Holocaust survivor of pitch-black humor) is convinced were Nazis. Meanwhile, over at the ramshackle Casita Meshugaloo, Chow Mein Vega (whose song “Yiddish Boogaloo” was sort of a Puerto Rican/Jewish anthem for the neighborhood) is trying without much success to grow vegetables like they do back on the island. There’s also the matter of the murder of Eli Rabinowitz, apparently by drug dealers, and a seemingly random shooting spree on the Fourth of July that’s got the cops interested. But the more novelistic elements here are of little interest. This is a story of people and places, not action and reaction. Kurlansky avoids the tired screeds against yuppification. Though there’s a definite air of the elegy here, he prefers just to celebrate the neighborhood as it is, a frothy, ever-changing stew of humanity: “drug dealers, family people, shopkeepers, observant Jews, secular Jews, all three Sals, and boogalistas alike.” Change is coming, but that’s not the end of the world.
Sugary but far from insubstantial: a definitive portrait of an era that’s all the better for not really trying to be one.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-44818-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
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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