A welcome, if much belated, entry in modern European literature in translation and deserving of a wide readership.
A forgotten Danish novel, first published more than a century ago and well-known in Europe, appears for the first time in English translation.
In this serial novel, which blends the grim moralism of Ibsen with the careful description of French realists like Zola and Flaubert, Pontoppidan spins a long story that borrows much from his own life. Peter Andreas Sidenius, Per for short, is the son of a Protestant minister in the Danish countryside, the fjord-carved coast of Jutland. One of 11 children, he has always been a willful boy, and “already, at an early age, a deliberate insubordination surfaced in him in the face of the rules and customs of the house.” One thing he surely doesn’t want to hear about is God or his father’s long-winded tales that always carry with them a moral of how good Christians should live. It takes some doing, but after demonstrating his intelligence, Per is allowed to go to Copenhagen and enroll in an engineering course—and to good ends, for he has a plan to straighten out the fjords, build canals, and turn Denmark into a major economic power. Some of the people he comes into contact with in school, his boardinghouse, and the local cafes “where he wasted more time and money than he could afford" dismiss him as a dreamer and his plan as too immature, but others encourage him. In this connection, he forms a friendship with Ivan Salomon, scion of a wealthy Jewish family, whose sister Jakobe becomes a source of fascination for Per—yet not enough that he can break away entirely from convention. Per, in his spiritual torment, becomes an embodiment of Kierkegaard-ian angst, while Jakobe, refreshingly, is a fully rounded, sympathetic character, a kind of literary cousin to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Pontoppidan’s novel is a little fusty here and there, but as a bildungsroman, it merits company alongside the best of Knut Hamsun and Thomas Mann.
A welcome, if much belated, entry in modern European literature in translation and deserving of a wide readership.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-90809-9
Page Count: 664
Publisher: Everyman’s Library
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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