A potent debut.
Audacious, no-holds-barred account of a Palestinian family’s suffering during 60 years of Israeli occupation.
In 1948, Yehya Abulheja, prosperous farmer and patriarch of a family that for 40 generations has occupied Ein Hod, a village near Mount Carmel, worries only about the coming olive harvest and his son Hasan’s marriage to an unsuitable Bedouin girl, Dalia. All is forgiven when Dalia bears sons Yousef and Ismael. Dismissing rumors that Jewish immigrants plan to establish their own state, annexing Palestinian lands, the Abulhejas are stunned when Ein Hod is shelled and its residents herded into a refugee camp at Jenin. During the forcible eviction, baby Ismael is snatched by an Israeli soldier desperate to help his despondent wife, a Holocaust survivor rendered sterile after repeated rapes by the SS. The couple renames the child David. Hasan and Dalia’s daughter Amal, Abulhawa’s protagonist, is born in Jenin. Ismael’s kidnapping has cost Dalia her sanity; Yehya is shot for trespassing on his former land; and Hasan disappears during the Six Day War in 1967. Yousef encounters David, an Israeli soldier whose facial scar resembles Ismael’s. After repeated beatings and torture by Israeli soldiers, including David, Yousef joins the PLO resistance fighters. Following Dalia’s death, Amal’s scholarly bent propels her from a Jerusalem orphanage/school to college in Philadelphia. She reunites with Yousef, his bride Fatima and their daughter Falasteen in Shatila, a Lebanese refugee enclave, where she teaches Palestinian children, marries Majid, a young doctor, and becomes pregnant. As Israel’s attacks on Lebanon mount, Amal returns to the States, intending to arrange for her family to follow. Soon, though, Majid perishes in the bombardment of Beirut and Fatima and Falasteen are slaughtered by the invaders. Yousef, a suspected terrorist, vanishes. In a fog of grief, Amal struggles to nurture her infant daughter, Sara. David reaches out in remorse to Amal, and a precarious healing begins.
A potent debut.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-046-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.
An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans, 2000).
Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.
A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.Pub Date: April 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
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