A sparse, cutting debut in which violence begets violence begets healing.
A young man infiltrates a secret university club and discovers a dangerous secret.
German journalist Würger’s debut novel begins with his protagonist, Hans, describing his idyllic childhood: “When I think back to the earliest years of my life it is always late summer.” A soft and curious boy, Hans lives with his parents in their home in a forest—a happy arrangement that ends quite suddenly. Years later, Hans—who is starved for friendship and family—receives an invitation from his aunt to attend St. John’s College, Cambridge. The offer comes with strings attached: Hans will have to investigate the Pitt Club, one of the oldest institutions on campus. The club is full of rich, privileged young men well-versed in secrets, debauchery, and something far more sinister. Aided by Charlotte, a fellow student, Hans is introduced into the world of the elite. Comprised of many different voices, the novel feels Greek chorus–esque. Some points of view only appear once (i.e., a shopkeeper’s) but others run through the entirety of the novel (i.e, that of Josh, an angry, toxic Pitt Club member who adores Hans). Made up of mostly short, uncomplicated sentences, the writing is also overwhelmingly evocative at times: “I told them how oranges tasted of adventure, and how the soft hair at the nape of girls’ necks sometimes looked like candyfloss.” While the crime at the novel’s center is not surprising, it serves as a catalyst for Würger’s interesting ruminations on class, violence, power, wealth, and masculinity. Many of these themes are also explored through boxing as Hans tries out for the university’s team. Boxing runs through the novel like a heartbeat—revealing the dangers of violent masculine camaraderie with every scene. The novel’s complicated ending touches on the problems of justice and redemption: who gets it, who deserves it, and its human cost.
A sparse, cutting debut in which violence begets violence begets healing.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2896-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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