Thought-provoking and gut-wrenchingly powerful.
A heart-rending novel about a Nazi death camp that didn't exist—but could have.
Hans-Peter Guth is a devoted family man, the type who takes his kids camping, gets on the floor to play soldiers with his son and talks to his daughter about the book she’s reading. He's also a mass murderer, responsible for the deaths of—by his own estimation—a million Jews. Guth is commandant of the Lubizec death camp in Poland, where trainloads of Jews are unloaded, stripped naked, shaved, then crammed into gas chambers. Of course, Guth himself never lays a finger on anyone—he leaves that to his sadistic guards—but he certainly runs the show, trying every day to mass murder more and more efficiently. Meanwhile, the few that the Nazis keep out of the gas chambers to serve as slave labor eke out a miserable and short existence, treated like animals and devoid of hope. Hicks, author of several poetry collections (Finding the Gossamer, 2009, etc.), tells the story of the fictional Lubizec as if it were a historical account, complete with footnotes and quotes from future fictional documentaries, to devastating effect. Of course, most of the things that happened in Hicks' fictional camp happened in the real death camps, but Hicks' documentary style not only adds a layer of realism to the story, but also allows him to comment on certain inherent problems with books on the subject. For instance, Hicks repeatedly underscores the sad fact that tales of the Holocaust tend to focus disproportionately on the Nazis since they were the ones keeping records and since exponentially more of them survived to tell what happened in the camps. Hicks points out that each and every one of the millions of innocent people who died in the camps are the ones whose stories actually deserve to be told. Hicks' prose is clear and unflinching, and while, as a result, there are many difficult-to-read scenes, this is as it should be.
Thought-provoking and gut-wrenchingly powerful.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58642-220-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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