Ben-Naftali doesn’t make full use of her material, and the result feels more tired than fresh.
One woman survives the Holocaust; decades later, another imagines what her life might have been like.
Elsa Weiss survived the Holocaust by obtaining a seat on the “Kastner train”—a train that smuggled more than 1,600 Jews to safety after Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann. Kastner’s train was real; in this novel by Israeli writer Ben-Naftali—her first to be translated into English—the reality of Elsa Weiss is up for debate. Once she arrives in Israel, Elsa works for decades as an English teacher before stepping off the roof of her apartment building. The novel is narrated by one of her students, who goes unnamed and who makes a project out of understanding Elsa’s life. That’s not easy to do. No one, it seems, knows anything about Elsa. What follows, then, is a work of the narrator’s imagining—a kind of novel within a novel. Why Ben-Naftali chose this framing device isn’t entirely clear, since she doesn't make full use of it. The vast majority of the book is taken up with descriptions of Elsa’s experiences; only occasionally are we reminded that the real Elsa was a cipher, that these descriptions are the narrator’s imaginings. But Ben-Naftali doesn’t fully explore what it might mean to imagine another person’s life or what these fictions illuminate about the narrator herself. Then, too, the narration hovers at a distance, favoring third-person description over dialogue or scenes in the present. The constant exposition makes Elsa into an abstraction and the other characters into less, even, than that.
Ben-Naftali doesn’t make full use of her material, and the result feels more tired than fresh.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948830-07-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Open Letter
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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
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
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