An imposing novel of ideas closely related in spirit to the great fictional syntheses of Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, as well as to the autobiographical masterpiece that is its specific inspiration: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Originally published in 1986 in N†das's native Hungary, this big book offers a startlingly wide-angled view of a young Hungarian writer (never named) whose pursuit of artistic happiness and success is intricately counterpointed against his country's struggles with Stalinist communism, climaxing in the revolution of 1956. In the first of several separate narratives, the writer describes his troubled youth during the 1950s, focusing on his explosive relations with his pro-communist father, a state prosecutor who committed suicide in 1956 (as did N†das's own father)—and also recounts his Bohemian lifestyle some 20 years later in Berlin, where he carries on love affairs with Thea, a temperamental actress, and also her lover, an equally mercurial poet named Melchior. A second story, which parallels the writer's own, is narrated by his fictional invention Thomas, the protagonist of a novel-in-progress set in Germany in the early 1900s. A third story is told by a boyhood friend of the writer's who happens to meet him in Moscow many years after their youth, and continues to think about the writer following the latter's death. His account contradicts the writer's earlier one—but it's made clear to us that the contradictions may be explained by the differences in personality and outlook of these two narrators. N†das's brilliant book is an epic of uncertainty, a dazzling fictional demonstration of the relativity of our efforts to understand ourselves and our world. To that end, the author and his counterparts suggest a series of ingenious discriminations between the unexamined life led by the European bourgeoisie and the involuted self-consciousness- -and, by implication, self-righteousness—of artistic responses to it. One of the major contemporary European novels.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-11543-5
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1997
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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