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
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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