A complex and layered personal/political novel perhaps best appreciated by those with an existing knowledge and interest in...
A sophisticated Paris-based architect faces emotional and professional obstacles when she returns to her native Israel with her two young sons to work on a controversial project.
Willingly abandoning her troubled homeland for a successful life in France and America, Llana Tsuriel cannot, it seems, get Israel out of her blood. The daughter of Aaron Tsuriel, a famous Russian-born “pioneer” who helped found the Jewish state, she is married to Holocaust scholar Alain Greenenberg and also carrying on an affair with Palestinian theater director Sayyid, with whom she is working. Their joint project is a radical “anti-memorial” in Jerusalem designed to foster cooperation and understanding by creating symbolic “huts” meant to be dismantled and rebuilt every seven years by multinational residents. So with ambitious plans to break ground on the structures and deal with her late father’s personal papers, she enthusiastically heads to the Middle East with her little boys, David and Jonathan, leaving an increasingly distant Alain to his own work. Unfortunately, just as she arrives in Israel, the first Gulf War breaks out, jeopardizing the fate of the memorial and angering Alain, who insists she return to Europe with their children. She remains in Jerusalem, riding out the war, and trying to come to grips with her father’s legacy and her own ambivalence over the contrasting Zionist and leftist ideals that have shaped her life. Told through diary entries addressed predominantly to her father, Llana’s story is mostly an internal struggle, touching on art, sex, love and history, with a healthy portion of guilt over some of the choices she has made. A literary prize-winner in Israel, Govrin’s second effort (The Name, 1998) is most accessible and satisfying in the passages in which Llana and her neighbors try to give the boys a “normal” existence during wartime. Those scenes have an immediacy lacking in the somewhat self-indulgent and dense musings that make up the majority of Llana’s observations.
A complex and layered personal/political novel perhaps best appreciated by those with an existing knowledge and interest in geopolitics.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59448-959-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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