Although Goldschmidt gives him a distinctive, if repellent voice, Mordechai reports the events of his life in a deadening...
Dutch author Goldschmidt’s first novel, an attempt to fictionalize the history of a Dutch pharmaceutical company that survived World War II although it was owned by Jews, offers a less than savory view of business ethics.
Twin brothers Mordechai and Aaron De Paauw inherit the family butcher business in the early 1920s when they're only 27. Ambitious Mordechai is soon running things while mild-mannered, morally upright Aaron remains in the background. In 1923, Mordechai teams up with Rafaël Levine, a Jewish scientist from Germany, to found Farmacon, which will manufacture insulin from animal pancreas excretions. The partnership flourishes, making scientific discoveries and lots of money, although Mordechai chafes at Levine’s efforts to hire as many German-Jewish refugees as possible. Ironically, Mordechai marries Rivka, the daughter of one of the German scientists, who bears him four daughters and a son. Meanwhile, Mordechai, a self-styled ladies' man, enjoys summoning female employees to his office to “seduce” them and wonders at Aaron’s lack of sex drive. Without Levine’s knowledge, Mordechai arranges for his brother to test out the testosterone Farmacon has been developing. The result drives Aaron temporarily insane with lust, and he goes to prison in 1938 without divulging Mordechai’s culpability. As the Nazis arrive, Mordechai escapes Holland with his family although Rivka, having learned about Mordechai’s predatory sexual activities, ends their marriage. But Mordechai’s primary concern is Farmacon’s continuing growth even as the war rages and those he left behind suffer. Returning to the postwar Netherlands, he breaks with Levine because Levine’s German (though Jewish) background might hurt business. Rivka, Aaron and Levine have all become fodder for Mordechai’s greed. Even as an old man approaching death, he has no epiphany to leaven the reader’s perception that he is a narcissistic creep.
Although Goldschmidt gives him a distinctive, if repellent voice, Mordechai reports the events of his life in a deadening follow-the-dots style that does nothing to mitigate the novel’s simplistic portrayal of nobility versus capitalist evil.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59051-649-2
Page Count: 267
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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