Superbly imagined first novel by a former Marine captain who was also the screenwriter for Bob Fosse's Cabaret, which was based on Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin. Nebenzal knows prewar Berlin like his own moles. For 12 years Daniel Saporta, a Sephardic Jew masquerading as a Spaniard named Daniel Salazar, runs the Klub Kaukasus in Berlin at the height of its decadence. And Klub Kaukasus is as decadent and colorful a cafe as you might ever hope to lose your virtue in. Especially nifty are Daniel's Turkish, Armenian, and Egyptian belly dancers (many of whom were parentally declitorized in pubescence) whose dances and orgasmically rippling bellies excite the high-styled clientele. The Klub is a fabulous success, and Nebenzal's knowledge of how to run such a club, keep the girls in line, and the show fresh is detailed with headspinning authenticity. One can't praise enough this novel's Nabokovian, termite-like detail, no matter what area of life it enters into: Middle Eastern Jewish life, German military life, the endless levels of a Pan-European capital's society, national varieties of cuisine, or the types of mentality of its characters. Daniel raises a streetwise former doorman, Lohmann, to be his second-in-command, and Lohmann's gratitude for being lifted out of the lower classes is one of the novel's most moving themes. But war comes; the club's Russian fare falls into the ersatz and makeshift; the high life departs; even the dancers are listless; and only Nazi toadies and functionaries fill the tables. Then Daniel is drafted unwillingly into helping the underground: The Germans have extended the Final Solution to the Middle East, with their Arab cohorts massacring Jews. Daniel must sacrifice his beloved Samira, a dancer, so she can become a spy servicing a Nazi pervert—and a rich scene it is when he givers her these orders. After a strong start, it gets only better.
Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1992
ISBN: 0-87951-458-2
Page Count: 290
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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