A broody tale of gay love and life behind the Iron Curtain.
A young gay man enters into a clandestine affair in the repressive political climate of communist Poland in the early 1980s.
From his new home in the Polish community of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Ludwik addresses this narrative to Janusz, the handsome university student he met at an agricultural “work education” camp outside Warsaw in the summer of 1980. His first sighting of Janusz is a pure coup de foudre, described in typically swoony terms: “A flash of heat traveled from my stomach to my cheeks, my thoughts jumbled like a ball of string….It was as if your presence already overpowered me, like a prophecy I was unable to read.” Their summer romance, initiated during a hiking trip to the lake district, is an idyll that cannot last; the gray realities of Warsaw life—food and medicine shortages, tight party control over university advancement, an emerging protest movement subject to crackdown—will come between the lovers. While Ludwik imagines leaving the country to escape its oppressions (James Baldwin’s novel of gay expatriate life in Paris, Giovanni’s Room, is a touchstone), Janusz dates Hania, the daughter of an apparatchik, in order to enjoy special privileges. “Everyone is leading someone on,” Janusz explains. “So what’s wrong with taking things into your own hands and not letting yourself go under?” Their conflict comes to a head during a debauched weekend at the country estate of Hania’s family, leading Ludwik toward his eventual fate. Debut novelist Jedrowski, born to Polish parents in Germany and now living in France, writes confidently in English—though his prose can turn overripe and his characters feel undernourished.
A broody tale of gay love and life behind the Iron Curtain.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-289000-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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