In this sequel to My Name is Asher Lev (1972), the author of The Chosen (1967) and Davita's Harp (1985)—as well as other fictional probes of the rich complexities of Jewish Orthodoxy—brings his protagonist artist back to the Hasidic community in Brooklyn from France. Asher had been "banished" 20 years before, and now once again he must exist between two apparently exclusive worlds: there is the sacred "world of Torah," and there is also the secular, solitary, and visionary world of the artist. Renowned painter Asher Lev, his wife Devorah (still psychically a captive of a Holocaust-crippled childhood), and a young son and daughter are in Brooklyn to participate in the mourning period for a revered uncle. Asher's father—the 89-year-old Rebbe, prime deputy for the leader of the Ladover Hasidic community—and Asher's mother are no nearer than ever to understanding Asher's deliberate turn to the "pagan" world of art. (Yet in the deceased uncle's study Asher finds a stunning collection of secular art and, from the uncle's fine and courageous mind, a gift of faith.) Through the days and nights—in the heart of the Ladovers in the States and in France—with the warm love of family, the pulsing of ritual loyalties and taboos, ripples of terror (as old fears and hatreds surface), Asher finds his "nerve ends still connected" to the community. Then, pressed between sacred and profane worlds, Asher joins in a dialectic with the riddling shades of such as Picasso, a famous sculptor, his dead uncle—and the Rebbe, both in his tiny person, or on the phone, and, at the close, after a miracle journey "in a single stride," in France. Just as magical—and disturbing—is the appearance in Asher's work of his little son's face, in the Sacrifice of Isaac. At the end, there is a linkage of worlds in a kind of redemptive sacrificial act in the gift of a son. Potok's style stiffens periodically into clumps of clichÉd settings ("in the distance a dog barked") or pokey dialogue. But, then again, there is that restless, eager journeying in the dark—and then the sudden shimmerings of possibility—in odysseys of the soul that gives Potok's spiritually searching novels their saving strength.
Pub Date: May 11, 1990
ISBN: 0449001156
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1990
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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