Brilliantly written with flashing insights, but an incoherent structure muffles its power.
An elderly woman looks back on a life permanently scarred by World War II in this latest from Icelandic novelist Helgason (The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning, 2012, etc.).
Reykjavik, 2009: 80-year-old Herra lives “alone in a garage, together with a laptop computer and an old hand grenade.” The laptop enables her to flirt with a bodybuilder in Australia and keep track of her three sons. They don’t visit much since she exited the nursing home they deemed appropriate for a woman with advanced emphysema and cancer. Herra doesn’t entirely blame them, freely admitting she was a lousy mother who drank too much and never stayed with one man for long. She may be planning her own cremation (at the 1,000 degrees of the title), but Herra recalls her amorous adventures with zest even as she wisecracks, “Men have their uses, but quick witted they sure ain’t.” Herra, by contrast, is exceedingly quick-witted and has a wickedly colorful way with words (well-rendered into English by FitzGibbon). Only when her recollections increasingly focus on the war years do we see that her verbal relish overlies profound trauma. The hand grenade is a memento of her father, seduced into Nazism while studying Old Norse in Germany. His enlistment in the German army ultimately results in Herra finding herself alone in the Hamburg train station at age 12. Her account of three years fending for herself in war-ravaged Europe is so brutally gripping that it’s a wrench to be yanked into the 1970s and the saga of Herra’s marriage to the drunken, abusive Baering. The novel never really recovers after this. It lurches between the '80s and a postwar sojourn in Argentina that seems to belong in another book before returning with diminished impact to the denouement of Herra’s wartime ordeal and her final present-day epiphany. Helgason’s fragmented chronology, so effective at first, proves to lack an overarching architecture that would unify its vivid pieces.
Brilliantly written with flashing insights, but an incoherent structure muffles its power.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61620-623-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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