A tender and insightful first novel by Toronto-based short-story writer Teleky (Goodnight Sweetheart, not reviewed) offers a quietly compelling view of a young American Jew in Paris who’s driven to seek an identity that will sustain her when her longtime lover suddenly dies. Rosie Kamin, born and raised in Pittsburgh, had a repressive but otherwise uneventful childhood and adolescence. But when her mother, who had survived Auschwitz, kills herself, Rose, now in college, unthinkingly steps into the breach and runs the family household and tends to her demanding father. When she finally realizes that her life is going nowhere, she flees to Paris, vowing never to return. Several fleeting relationships with Algerians reinforce her outcast status, but her subsequent ten years with Serge, a Frenchman, offer a hitherto unknown degree of normalcy—no matter that he’s a diehard Communist, an alcoholic, and estranged from his own family. Rosie gladly gets what she needs from him, asking no questions and generally savoring her time together with him—until his sudden hospitalization makes her aware that he may have problems she’s unaware of. No sooner does she come to this realization than Serge’s liver fails and he dies. Neither a trip with her sister Deb to their mother’s home city of Budapest nor the advances of Serge’s best friend help: Rosie is alone again. She crudely stitches a yellow star on her raincoat, wearing it everywhere, and plans to take her own life at Serge’s grave; but when she arrives to do the deed, she discovers that she can—t. Slowly, painfully, she finds something tentative yet real within herself, an increasingly firm sense of character and purpose that brings her back from the edge. The full measure of Rosie’s suffering and estrangement is exquisitely conveyed, together with gemlike scenes of Paris life on the fringe; her story is a small but remarkable triumph.
Pub Date: April 7, 1998
ISBN: 1-883642-96-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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