A fragmentary, elliptical story of family unhappiness emerges from the tormented consciousness of a hardworking woman doctor—in this compact and very affecting first novel by an Austrian psychiatrist. It begins with the musings prompted by its unnamed narrator’s performance of an autopsy, and ends with an “apartment sale” of her deceased father’s few possessions. The narrative accordingly shifts between graphically clinical descriptions of emergency medical procedures and reluctant mental travels back to the world of her childhood and youth in rural Austria. Her German mother’s incompatibility with the narrator’s depressive, combative father (a soldier and later POW during WWII, though not a Nazi Party member) grew exacerbated by the disapproval of her husband’s Austrian relatives and later by his drinking. One of the narrator’s older brothers wasted away from complications following colon surgery; the other dispassionately separated himself from their troubled family. It could scarcely be bleaker, but Breznik’s mosaic portrayal of her perhaps too generic victims (all five principals are, appropriately, nameless) assumes real emotional credibility, thanks largely to convincing transitions that link the narrator’s “night duty” to her half-buried past. Routine checks on moribund patients are juxtaposed with visits to the nursing home where, long after her mother’s death, her father lies dying of the alcoholism that finally drove them apart. Soothing a frightened three-year-old brings vivid memories of nights when she slept with a knife under her pillow, fearing her father’s violence. Rummaging through his collection of hats recalls the cerebral hemorrhage that struck him years before she was born, which perhaps shaped his subsequent instability and embitterment. It’s a tribute to the power of Breznik’s imagination that one finishes this novel both moved by its shadowy characters’ pathetic fates and frustrated that we know them so incompletely—a
Pub Date: April 11, 1999
ISBN: 1-883642-85-X
Page Count: 131
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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