A welcome introduction to a writer little known to American readers.
A collection of stories, as much essay as fiction, originally published in 1988, by the late Austrian novelist and polemicist.
“It’s out of powerlessness that I sit down to my desk to write and out of powerlessness that I get up and walk away again,” sighs one of Kofler’s narrators. Power is a constant preoccupation; while one narrator insists that “literature is a fight against crime,” others accede or are complicit. Born in 1947, Kofler raises searching, often unsubtle questions about Austria’s guilt in World War II and the Holocaust; the nation may have chosen forgetfulness—“You saw nothing!” as one brownshirt hollers at an old woman, emblematically—but Kofler, as if channeling Karl Kraus or Friedrich Dürrenmatt from previous generations, is there to hold the mirror up to its eyes. So it is that one embittered veteran of the war grumbles, well, sure, 6 million Jews may have died, but “what about the three and a half million German soldiers who set out to make a better future for themselves and wound up losing their lives, what about them?” That “better future” is a matter of debate. In the opening paired narratives, a mountain guide and the tourist he leads thrash over whether to keep the alpine country pristine or set down a reservoir and power plant in the middle of all that scenery. “Bullshit, this is bullshit, I want to call out but I can barely make a sound,” laments the visitor, just one of countless Austrians who, now as then, go along to get along. Kofler’s diction is unadorned and rough-edged, qualities which the translation straightforwardly captures; the only thing wanted is more thorough annotation to gloss such things as the symbolism of the kingfisher and what Kofler means by phrases such as “a Franconian nightmare,” though the existing notes are helpful in outlining matters such as the history of the neofascist politician Jörg Haider, “a self-nominated outpost-German.”
A welcome introduction to a writer little known to American readers.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62897-004-3
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Dalkey Archive
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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
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
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