A writer’s “metamorphosis” from confident creator into a passive “observer and chronicler” who drops out of the milieu that’s sustained him forms the core of this ponderous, yet fascinating, impressionistic autobiographical novel by the noted Austrian playwright and fiction writer (A Journey to the Rivers, 1997, etc.). Handke’s narrator, who both is and is not his creator, is a former lawyer turned successful author whose ambition had been to write “a great story that would bind together and at the same time thoroughly air out his fellow countrymen, and not only them.” Knowing himself a failure, he retreats to a remote hamlet (which he dubs an inland “bay”) near Porchofontaine, outside Paris. There, he cultivates friendships with several people (among them a gifted painter and filmmaker; a —Woman Friend,” who is both something more than that and a former Miss Yugoslavia; and a rebellious priest)—all potentially useful characters as well as aspects of his own inquisitive psyche. Rueful memories of separation from his wife Ana (“the woman from Catalonia”) and son Valentin (who’s inherited his father’s restlessness) are juxtaposed against other recollections of the narrator’s past, political and literary ruminations (we learn a great deal about what are presumably Handke’s aesthetic principles and tastes), and—in this bulky volume’s most egregious miscalculation—a lengthy series of “observations” of his “bay’s” distinctive geographical and ethnographic features: It’s as if Robinson Crusoe had set up camp near Walden Pond, met John McPhee and Franz Kafka, and absorbed the former’s interests and the latter’s style and sensibility. But much of the novel is a lot better than that. The narrator has the wit to challenge the sincerity of even his most heartfelt outpourings—which are (or soon will be) literary expressions. The writing throughout is both painstakingly self-conscious and superbly lucid; we feel everywhere the pressure of an agile, well-stocked mind insistently scrutinizing itself. Not an easy read, but a rewarding one—and arguably an indispensable gloss on Handke’s unusual and provocative oeuvre.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-21755-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
