Jacobsen has a reputation. This work can only harm it.
From the respected Norwegian novelist (The New Water, 1997, etc.), an artless trifle about the impact of a small girl on a family in Oslo.
It’s 1961. Finn lives with his mother Gerd in a small apartment in the projects. Fate has dealt her a number of blows. Her husband, a crane operator, divorced her. A year later, he died in an accident on the job. No widow’s pension for Gerd, though, for her ex had re-married. Gerd works part-time in a shoe store; money is tight. Wallpapering the apartment means they must rent a room to a lodger. Their ad draws the attention of the second wife. She’s a drug addict who intends to unload her daughter on them. So their household expands by two: the lodger Kristian, a union official, and 6-year-old Linda, Finn’s half-sister. Finn is the narrator and, we gather, a little older than Linda. He’s a mama’s boy who often breaks into tears. Linda does not make a good first impression. She smells funny, her hair is wild and she’s silent as the grave. Nonetheless Finn has a jealous fit, biting his mother and breaking windows in the building. When that passes, he becomes protective of his new sister, and bristles when Kristian asks if she’s retarded. But maybe she is, or at least dyslexic. We never really know, because this episodic novel is such a muddle, ill-served by a wretched translation. Nor do we know Kristian’s true character, and what is transpiring between him and Gerd, who’s still battling problems from her own childhood (her father abused her). At one point she visits a mental hospital. The story ends when Linda is removed to a foster home. She was, thinks Finn, “destiny, beauty and a catastrophe.” She had had, we infer, a transformative effect on Gerd and Finn, though the novel has failed to make the case.
Jacobsen has a reputation. This work can only harm it.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-55597-595-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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
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