A muted and uninvolving first novel that juxtaposes the life and career of a neglected French writer, Violette Leduc (190772), with the purportedly parallel story of the woman who attempts to write her biography. Zackheim's unnamed narrator, a painter whose marriage and career have rescued her from a traumatic girlhood, travels to Paris to research the life of Leduc, a now nearly forgotten figure who emerged from an obscure youth to become the intimate companion of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, and other famous postwar literary figures, and the author of a justly celebrated autobiography (La BÉtarde), among other books. The narrator's ``research'' is limited to her meetings with Lili Jacobs, an elderly Parisienne who with her husband knew Leduc during WW II. Their conversations about the war and the Resistance alternate with the narrator's unsurprising recollections of her own unhappy youth, restless ``pilgrimages,'' and her family's complex European Jewish heritage. The protagonist's deep respect for the courage with which Leduc surmounted her own ignoble past (she was born illegitimate), lack of physical beauty, and years of poverty to become one of the most respected writers of her time fuels her own writing. But we aren't shown this: We're told it, in exhausting conversations and workmanlike summaries of facts Zackheim has all too obviously culled from sources listed in her ``novel's'' perhaps unintentionally revealing bibliography. Leduc, who surely was genuinely fascinating, is scarcely visible here. Instead we're given vague, clichÇd paeans to Leduc's sensitivity and originality (``To Violette sexuality was an embrace of her life''). Only in the final 60 pages, when long-delayed information on the specifics of Leduc's life is finally conveyed, do we get a fleeting sense of the emotional urgency and intellectual drama that the writer's embattled life suggests. The subject has great intrinsic interest, but the challenge of communicating something essential about Leduc, or about the sources of her art, has not been met here. A real disappointment.
Pub Date: Aug. 27, 1996
ISBN: 1-57322-036-1
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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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