As rich and bittersweet as the best of Daalder’s creations.
Schogt’s second novel (The Wild Numbers, 2000) concerns a chocolate-maker who pursues perfection in his candies with the same monomaniacal drive as any great artist.
Joop Daalder’s small chocolate shop in Toronto faces demolition to make way for a mega-grocery. Angry and embittered, Joop sees market-driven mediocrity destroying his pursuit of unbending excellence. That effort has shaped his life, which Schogt traces from Joop’s earliest childhood in Holland as the unmusical, non-academic and mostly ignored youngest child in a Dutch family of intellectuals. After Joop’s first accidental taste of carefully prepared food, his own family’s lack of interest in what they eat further alienates him. Later, biting into a ripe apricot on a family vacation, he realizes that “I taste, therefore I am.” While at university, he travels to France, where he comes under the mentoring spell of a village candy-maker who cares less about pleasing his customers than perfecting his chocolate. But Joop must cut his apprenticeship short when his girlfriend Emma gets pregnant. The two soon marry. Back in Holland, he works for a premier chocolate confectioner, where he is disdainful of the company’s shortcuts. After his father’s death, Joop emigrates with his family to Canada and opens a shop that wins acclaim. Focused on his work, he largely ignores Emma and his son, who grows up as the American antithesis of all Joop values, just as Joop was the antithesis of his parents’ values. Is Joop an arrogant fool or an artist willing to sacrifice everything for his ideals? With the demise of his shop, Joop recognizes the emotional cost to himself and his family. His late attempt to connect to his wife and grandchildren demands the same energy he put into his candy-making. Schogt writes about the price of art, but also about socioeconomics, alienation, family and love.
As rich and bittersweet as the best of Daalder’s creations.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-731-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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