There’s a hint of Isak Dinesen in La Farge’s lush romantic images of sheltered lives seething with unacknowledged desires...
This lavishly imagined and highly entertaining historical novel, inspired by the life and work of Parisian architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91), is a distinct improvement over La Farge’s somewhat cluttered debut, The Artist of the Missing (1999).
Both an opening “Note to the English Edition” and a summary “Afterword” identify this as an English translation of a 1922 tale by one (presumably fictional) Paul Poissel. The story they enclose weaves its way circuitously toward a focus on Haussmann, beginning with an extended account of the early life of a foundling named Madeleine, rescued from the Seine to which her (widowed) biological father had consigned her, raised in a convent where she nourishes her delusions of noble birth, then “adopted” by De Fonce, a cunning “demolition man” who becomes both her lover and her introduction to the glittering social world of which the much-admired (and married) baron Haussmann is a prominent member. La Farge’s occasionally wheezy plot, which ranges over nearly half a century and pauses for numerous digressive episodes, matters rather less than do his informed and densely detailed pictures of the city and its environs which the brilliant planner (whose creative energies realize many of the Second Empire’s utopian dreams) reshapes from its medieval origins. And the visionary bureaucrat indulges all the while his passions for the similar perfection of ardent, willing women—notably Madeleine, who becomes his mistress, bears his child, and accomplishes her revenge for Haussmann’s benign neglect of her in a series of skillfully staged climactic scenes within the reconstructed city, at a lavish costume ball (where Madeleine, costumed as Marie Antoinette, meets “author” Paul Poissel), and at the imperial country retreat at Compiègne. The tensions among duty, artifice, and passion are thus vividly played out in a superbly realized period setting.
There’s a hint of Isak Dinesen in La Farge’s lush romantic images of sheltered lives seething with unacknowledged desires and complexities. An unusual, and unusually compelling, novel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-16833-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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