A novel about star-crossed lovers fails, in the end, to come fully to life.
Two Holocaust survivors fall in love at a distance by writing letters to one another in this debut novel.
World War II has just ended, and the concentration camps have been liberated. Miklos and Lili, both Hungarian Jews, both survivors of the Belsen camp, are taken separately to two rehabilitation hospitals in Sweden, where they each begin a long convalescence. Then Miklos is given a poor prognosis: his lungs have degenerated to such an extent that he can expect to live for only six more months. Miklos responds to the news by beginning a letter-writing campaign. After obtaining the names and addresses of all 117 Hungarian women convalescing in Sweden, Miklos writes a flirtatious letter to each one. A few write back, but it’s Lili, a sweet and spirited girl, with whom Miklos develops a rich, and romantic, relationship. While their doctors hector them about their health, Miklos and Lili exchange letters, sweets, and kisses. Meanwhile, Miklos is in open rebellion at his own prognosis. This is the first novel by Gárdos, an award-winning film director in Hungary. In a note at the back of the book, Gárdos explains that the story is based on his own mother and father’s courtship; the excerpts from Miklos' and Lili's letters in the book are the letters they exchanged in real life. Indeed, Miklos is often referred to by the narrator as “my father.” It’s a charming story, but as a novel, the work has the flattened quality of a children’s book or a pantomime. It isn’t just history, or even the plot, that’s been flattened: it’s also the characters’ desires, motivations, and reasoning. All that charm crystallizes into something too precious, too cute. Nothing feels quite real: not the war, not Miklos’ illness, not even the petty envy of one of Lili’s friends. It reads like a fairy tale but with lowered stakes and a predictable ending.
A novel about star-crossed lovers fails, in the end, to come fully to life.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-76979-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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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