Yes, but fictions with a moral bite, depicting a world in which everyone, it seems, is complicit in crimes not yet...
“One meets the strangest people in one’s life.” Indeed, and so it is in this somber trilogy of novellas from the recent French Nobel Prize winner.
Modiano’s work is unknown to most North American readers, and this is as good an introduction as any. The stories here highlight his concerns as a chronicler of the Occupation years and the lean times leading up to 1968; if they were films—and, it should be noted, Modiano is also a screenwriter; co-author, among other things, of the script for Lacombe Lucien (1974)—then Jean-Paul Belmondo would play several leads, always with a Gauloise stuck in his mouth at a moody, meaningful angle. The first story, Afterimage, concerns a mysterious photographer who works the chic world of fashion while maintaining a very private aura; the narrator announces at the beginning that he still knows only a little about Francis Jansen, who “did everything he could to be forgotten…completely dropping out of sight.” Jansen is the antithesis of what a swinging fashion photographer is supposed to be, as if Camus had a Rollei slung around his neck—and yet there he is, the owner of “a truth that we’ve intuited but kept hidden from ourselves, out of carelessness or cowardice.” Lean, existentially charged, the title story depicts a boy at the boundary of bourgeois society and the demimonde of the theater and circus, where people bear names such as Little Hélène and Snow White and have done some jail time. The Baudelarian title of the last story, Flowers of Ruin, signals that the reader should not expect a light farce, and indeed, a police report figures in the first few pages. In a preface, the translator notes that the stories were published several years apart but cohere nicely, and though they’re closely informed by the events of Modiano’s life, “it is important to remember that these are fictions.”
Yes, but fictions with a moral bite, depicting a world in which everyone, it seems, is complicit in crimes not yet specified. Moody, elegant and dour.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-19805-8
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
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
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