Flirts dangerously with unreadability.
A charismatic martyr of the Spanish Civil War lives on in the memories of three erstwhile pals who have an axe to grind.
In 2018, Janeczek won Italy’s prestigious annual Strega prize, the first woman to have done so in 15 years. Gerda Pohorylle, working pseudonymously as Gerda Taro, was also a first in the 1930s, a female photojournalist on the front lines as leftist troops waged their ultimately unsuccessful battle against the Franco coup. A German Jew who fled Leipzig for Paris, Gerda and her 20-something friends enjoy a brief idyll of cafe society. A typist, she becomes obsessed with photography and heads for Spain with her mentor and lover, André Friedmann, a Hungarian refugee, who takes on the name Robert Capa. (Together they concocted both aliases.) The two separate to cover the rebellion, intending to reunite, but shortly before her 27th birthday, Gerda is killed in a collision with a tank. Janeczek, as an epilogue confirms, hews closely to the known facts about her characters, all real people. The pre–World War II upheaval is very much in the background. Instead we have mostly retrospective musings, half-realized scenes of young love and its attendant angst as recounted by Gerda’s surviving contemporaries, all, like her, German exiles. Dr. Willy Chardack lives in Buffalo, New York, where his routine of the New York Times and pastries is disrupted by a phone call from an old friend that prompts him to ruefully recall his mostly unrequited crush on Gerda. Ruth Cerf, Gerda’s best girlfriend, seems to view Gerda mainly as a rival for male attention. Georg Kuritzkes, a neurologist in Italy, still rankles over being displaced by Capa as Gerda’s love interest. For long stretches, little happens. Gerda is seen only through a glass darkened by resentment. But the chief hurdle for readers of English is the prose. Surprisingly, Goldstein's translation fails to unknot frequent syntactic snarls, in contrast to her limpid renderings of Elena Ferrante’s work. The text is replete with head-scratcher sentences like this: “The ladies of high society were already competing to see who could gorge Hitler, in the face of the workers reduced to poverty by their consorts.”
Flirts dangerously with unreadability.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60945-547-7
Page Count: 297
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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