Set against a backdrop of the emancipation of the serfs, touching on the (assumed) backwardness of rural Russia and the role...
Russian author Khvoshchinskaya exposes class differences and hypocrisies in this rediscovered novel translated into English for the first time.
A self-effacing widow of the rural gentry named Nastasya Ivanovna and her 17-year-old daughter, Olenka, receive an unexpected visit from a well-traveled, self-regarding aristocrat neighbor. Long absent from his estate, Ovcharov has negligently allowed it to fall into disrepair. Determined to spend the season in the country for his health and the purported education of his peasants, he throws the women's household into chaos by asking to rent their bathhouse. Meanwhile, a spiteful cousin with religious pretensions has arrived for an indefinite visit, taken over Olenka's room, and begun turning Nastasya Ivanovna's serfs against her. Ovcharov pens articles about the changing state of Russia and the important role enlightened nobles like himself must play. "Benefit to society—that is our watchword; and we must insist on this benefit, sternly insist." The machinations of a local aristocratic busybody—who wants Olenka to marry her protégé so that she can continue an adulterous affair with him—further complicate the situation. Khvoshchinskaya mocks the pomposity of interfering snobs who expect unquestioning obedience from their social "inferiors" with a light, ironic touch reminiscent of Trollope ("may heaven forgive him the frivolity of his thoughts....And in forgiving Ovcharov may heaven above forgive us all!"). But in her sympathetic depiction of the central mother-daughter relationship Khvoshchinskaya stakes her own territory and widens the boundaries of the 19th-century Russian novel. We learn early on, in an aside, that Olenka was born after "the untimely deaths of eight infants." Worried about her only daughter's potential marriage and "what kind of a fellow" the groom will turn out to be, her fretful mother thinks, "They all seem fine before the wedding."
Set against a backdrop of the emancipation of the serfs, touching on the (assumed) backwardness of rural Russia and the role of its elite in political reform, the book at its heart is the story of two country women asserting their independence.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-231-18302-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
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