The rare woman revolutionary has her day in a story written with tremendous conviction and feeling.
Canadian novelist Richler (Throw Away Angels, not reviewed) fashions a tale of lyric historical suspense out of a Jewish girl’s life—from her stunted beginnings in a late-19th-century Belarussian village to her political arrest during the 1905 Russian Revolution.
From a harsh Siberian prison, in 1911, teenaged Miriam relates in flashback the sad story leading to her incarceration for life. Born in the dirt-poor shtetl on the swampy Pripet River, Miriam is doubly cursed: her mother walks into the sea after giving birth to her; and her forbidding stepmother, Tsila, leaves a death scar on her neck from slicing her trachea open when she suffers diphtheria as a child. (“Your mouth is lovely,” Tsila tells the child, teaching her to speak.) Miriam grows up under the sour, morbid teachings of Tsila, who scorns the town’s gossips and dreams of a better life outside of Russia. Pogroms descend on defenseless Jewish villages, and insurrection is in the air: by degrees, Miriam is drawn into secret political meetings and running errands for agitators. Sent to Kiev to find her aunt Bayla, who has run off with her suspect fiancé, Leib, Miriam suffers her first imprisonment for dropping pamphlets over the balcony at the opera; soon, thanks to Bayla’s lax supervision, she becomes a member of the Socialist movement. Although well educated and deeply committed, Miriam is young and falls sway to more forceful personalities, like Leib, who seduces her irresponsibly; as a result, her final imprisonment feels arbitrary and unreal. Richler has done admirable research (she lists reams of sources in the back); her novel’s strength lies in the quietly assured detail of Miriam’s peasant family beginnings. The revolutionaries, inevitably, spout rather uninteresting slogans, and the ending rushes to a neat conclusion.
The rare woman revolutionary has her day in a story written with tremendous conviction and feeling.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-009677-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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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