Fine and true: Karnezis breathes fresh life into traditional Greek society without mocking or sanitizing it (much like de...
Nineteen debut stories reflect daily life in a Greek village over many years.
Greece, first of all, is a nation of villages—from the sooty neighborhoods of Athens down to the tiny place (“so poor it doesn’t have a name”) that’s the epicenter of these tales. The first-time author (a Greek engineer living in Britain) knows the brusque clannishness of his native land and conveys the rhythms and tempers of its life with a deft touch. “Another Day on Pegasus,” for example, is told from the perspective of a bus driver: a sort of Greek Ralph Kramden who argues with his conductor, insults (or flirts with) his passengers, and manages despite the odds to keep his bus (“Pegasus”) running from day to day. Greek bureaucracy is portrayed in its harshest light in “Jeremiad,” about the unhappy fate of an old man who gets to the Pension Office late and dies in the waiting room before his claim is settled. Shadows of the classical age stretch into the present in “Circus Attraction” and “Cassandra Is Gone,” both about the career of a centaur who becomes the star attraction of a flyblown rural circus and falls in love with the tattooed lady (who may or may not be the original Cassandra of Agamemnon). “A Classical Education” (a small-town clerk’s attempts to teach Homer to his parrot) has a Flaubertian tone to it, while “Sacrifice” (a brief sketch of a father and son who slaughter a murderous cow) has a bitter intensity reminiscent of Chekhov. The finest piece, “Immortality,” is an elegiac, almost mystical account of villagers in the early 20th century as they beg a waylaid photographer to “make us live forever” by taking their picture.
Fine and true: Karnezis breathes fresh life into traditional Greek society without mocking or sanitizing it (much like de Bernières’s Corelli’s Mandolin).Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-18937-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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