While attempting to be whimsical and delightful, this tiny novel feels just a bit too precious and pleased with itself. In...
When Valerie’s elderly aunt Charlotte goes missing, she must step in to take care of business at the old Ringelnatz & Co. bookstore.
Valerie’s life was on an orderly course until her aunt disappeared, leaving a note that simply said her niece was to manage affairs in her absence. The young woman had been attending business school and enjoyed decent-enough companionship with her boyfriend. When she arrives at Ringelnatz, the shop is a mess. Books are arranged haphazardly, and the accounting system’s nonexistent. There’s also a pregnant rat which oddly doesn’t seem to bother Valerie in the least. In time, she considers the rodent a dear friend, feeding and caring for it like a modern-day Disney princess. In his debut novel, German literary agent Montasser pens a love letter to literature in the form of this story of a bookseller with a magical ability to prescribe just the right book for each of her customers. And one mysterious book—which Valerie initially presumes is defective because of its missing pages—causes the young woman to question what is and is not possible both on and off the page. Through her interactions with customers and letters from satisfied readers, Valerie begins to see the charm amid chaos at Ringelnatz, thus challenging her to reflect on her own life. In a story set in a bookstore, references to authors and literature are to be expected, and this is no exception. But the name-dropping adds little, if anything, to the story. This anemic novel, translated from German, is told by a distant narrator who is sometimes poetic but more often pretentious.
While attempting to be whimsical and delightful, this tiny novel feels just a bit too precious and pleased with itself. In the end, it’s not so special.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-780-74866-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
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