Trademark Modiano, brittle and elegant, with more questions than answers.
Brooding, philosophically rich novel by Modiano (Missing Person, 2014, etc.), recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in literature.
Jean B. is a filmmaker—a documentary filmmaker, more precisely, and one constantly on the go from continent to continent and culture to culture: “I was just back from Oceania,” he recalls, “and I was to leave for Rio de Janeiro a few days later.” This tour finds him on a short layover in Milan while traveling to Paris by train—and everyone knows that you don’t go to Milan in August, when everyone is gone or hiding from the heat. Apparently the heat is too much, or something is too much in any event, for another traveler, Ingrid Theysen, who, Jean learns, killed herself a couple of days earlier after drinking just the same drink he has now ordered. It’s not the drink’s fault but instead the weight of the whole oppressive 20th century: the war, the occupation, the whole bit. The thing is, Jean knew Ingrid two decades earlier, when she’d brightly said, “We’ll pretend to be dead.” Why should Ingrid want to do so? What secret did she hold—and how about Rigaud, the fellow whom she’d run off with during the war, leaving it to her poor parents to place advertisements begging for information about their missing daughter? Modiano is in high mystery mode as Jean sets out to retrace Ingrid’s steps past “groups of German soldiers and French policemen,” hugging the walls while trying to avoid being seen. And why? Well, there’s the nub, and Modiano takes his time solving the puzzle and then not filling in every blank—not least the one that might tell us why Jean should be interested in the first place. Along the way, he coolly evokes the black-and-white grittiness of France in the early 1960s, when so many were trying to forget the events of 20 years before, and leaves much of the rest to the reader’s imagination.
Trademark Modiano, brittle and elegant, with more questions than answers.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56792-538-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Verba Mundi
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
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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