Rich, lyrical, philosophically dense—not an easy work to take in but one that repays every effort.
A genre-crossing, pensive, peripatetic novel by Israeli author Grossman (To the End of the Land, 2010, etc.).
Grossman’s previous novel described a walk across the scorching Judean desert in quest of peace. The walking continues in this book, a blend of verse, drama and prose that recalls Karl Kraus’ blistering Last Days of Mankind (1919) in both subject and form. Where Kraus described the self-immolation of Europe in World War I, Grossman ponders a world in which “[c]old flames lapped around us,” a world caught up in formless, chaotic conflict about which we know only a few things—especially that people, young people, have died. The “Walking Man” goes in quest of the lost, but, leaving his home and village, he manages only to encircle it in an ever-widening ambit. Says “The Woman,” “You /circle / around me / like a beast / of prey,” but he is searching, not hunting, his circling an apparent effort at exhaustiveness. Others join him, the predator-prey metaphor working overtime: One woman likens her spirit to “a half-devoured beast / in its predator’s mouth.” In the end, Kraus gives way to a modernist verse reminiscent of Eliot: “We walk in gloom. / Across the way, on gnarled rock, / a spider spins a web, spreads out his taut, / clear net.” The lesson learned from such observations? Perhaps this: Though death is final, the fact of death continues to reverberate among the living, awed and heartbroken.
Rich, lyrical, philosophically dense—not an easy work to take in but one that repays every effort.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-35013-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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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