bookshelf

LAISH

Name: LAISH
Author: Aharon Appelfeld
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4159-4

by Aharon Appelfeld and translated by Aloma Halter ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2009

A story that is, paradoxically, low-key and intense.

bookshelf

A quiet narrative of high expectation and muted desperation from Israeli writer Appelfeld (All Whom I Have Loved, 2007, etc.).

Set in a vaguely pre-war period in the 20th century, the book recounts the journey of a caravan meandering through Eastern Europe and trying to get to Jerusalem, which is continually held out as a promised land of health and healing. As Sruel, one of the de facto leaders of the convoy comments, “Everything is filthy except for Jerusalem.” The eponymous Laish, an adolescent orphan, narrates his story of despair and hope. Appelfeld writes in an unadorned yet forceful style, taking Laish and his companions through a series of adventures that are too subtle to be called harrowing; still, they test the mettle of the Jewish vagabonds involved in the journey. Some of the conflicts involve traders dabbling in shady business deals that bring in money for the continuation of the pilgrimage. One of the original leaders dies, leaving Laish a book in which to record the deaths of others, not exactly a propitious beginning for the journey. Other forces are also at work to pull apart the group—attacks by hostile ethnic subcultures, for example, and rain and plague. Laish is also tempted by the distractions of wine and women, going so far as to steal money from Blind Menachem in an anguished attempt to recover Maya, a prostitute he’d encountered in a city along the way. Eventually the travelers hear rumors of the possibility of taking a ship to Jerusalem, so the few remaining members sell their wagons and horses and go to Galacz to await a ship. There they’re forced to commit one last desperate act to ensure their survival, one that while not overly noticeable in the grand scheme of their journey is nonetheless fraught with pain.

A story that is, paradoxically, low-key and intense.

Pub Date: March 10, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-8052-4159-4

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Schocken

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
POLAND, A GREEN LAND
by Aharon Appelfeld ; translated by Stuart Schoffman

- BOOK REVIEW
TO THE EDGE OF SORROW
by Aharon Appelfeld ; translated by Stuart Schoffman

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAN WHO NEVER STOPPED SLEEPING
by Aharon Appelfeld ; translated by Jeffrey M. Green

bookshelf

THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

bookshelf

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

bookshelf

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.