Both sentimental and avant-garde, much as with The Dancer Upstairs, the story here beats with so strong a pulse that its...
Another richly imagined tale of thwarted romance from Shakespeare (The Dancer Upstairs, 1997).
Again, the author spins a web of connections among characters whose lives have been warped or effaced by East German treachery under Communism. Peter Hithersay is a student at an English boarding school when his mother reveals, on his 16th birthday, that his father is an East German escapee from a work detail of political prisoners. From then on, Peter is a man unmoored: he becomes “German” at school, skips Oxford for medical school in Hamburg, and, on a fateful trip to Leipzig to see where his mother’s one-night tryst took place, ends up having a fateful one-nighter himself, with a young gamine nicknamed Snowleg. Love strikes Peter hard, but he turns coward when Snowleg takes up his offer to smuggle her to the West. The rest of his life is a bizarre and entertaining postmodern journey of atonement. Working without rest, he becomes a revered resident pediatrician while being romantically hogtied by an older dominatrix-esque artist, losing a ten-year-old patient by a fluke, failing his boards, and being busted for drug addiction. Starting over again, he goes back to school and becomes a gerontologist and Lothario who beds every woman within reach—without, of course, healing the wound that is Snowleg. A chance deathbed encounter with Snowleg’s grandmother prompts a frantic return to Leipzig and a search among Stasi files, a bit of neo-Nazi violence, near-gunplay, and, in the requisite reunion, Snowleg herself: married with children, then divorced, she’s been broken by Peter’s betrayal, though she’s put herself back together again and is an artist.
Both sentimental and avant-garde, much as with The Dancer Upstairs, the story here beats with so strong a pulse that its portrait of a frozen East Germany will remind readers of the journey anyone devastated by loss and betrayal must make in order to reach the point of risking love again.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-101146-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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