Dense, compelling, often weirdly funny, a dark fairy tale told as a murder mystery. Rewarding and highly recommended.
Famed Austrian writer Bachmann's only novel, set in Vienna and first published in 1971, takes on the vexed struggle between the sexes in a decaying city.
The narrator, an author, lives with her partner, Malina, but is madly in love with Ivan, who lives nearby. On the surface the story of an affair, the first section of the novel ("Happy with Ivan") captures the way love seems to affect the lover's surroundings: "the incidence of pain in my neighborhood is decreasing, between Ungargasse 6 and 9 fewer misfortunes occur...the world's schizoid soul, its crazy, gaping split, is healing itself imperceptibly." She plans to write a "glorious book," one that will make people "leap for joy." The threat to her happiness is not Malina, who "torments me with his impeccable self-control, his imperturbable trust," but something darker and harder to name. She is haunted by "murder thoughts" and the threat of violence, against anonymous women particularly. In the second section, ill and confined to her apartment, she is cared for by Malina while she dreams disturbingly of her father attempting to kill her beside "the cemetery of the murdered daughters." The postwar years hang over the city and the book. "Here there is always violence. Here there is always struggle. It is the everlasting war." As well as dreams, the narrative is interspersed with dialogues, an absurdist, hilarious interview, the story of a princess, fragments of the narrator's writing, and unsent letters she signs "an unknown woman." Her ways of coping as well as her despair come to feel inevitable. "I react to every situation, submit to every emotional upheaval and suffer the losses—which Malina notices, detachedly." "Most men usually make women unhappy," she tells us, "and there's no reciprocity, as our misfortune is natural, inevitable, stemming as it does from the disease of men, for whose sake women have to bear so much in mind, continually modifying what they've just learned—for, as a rule, if you have to constantly brood about somebody, and generate feelings about him, then you're going to be unhappy." In the book's final section, as Ivan's feelings cool and Malina's caretaking stifles, the narrator retreats into the story of a postman who, out of a sense of delicacy, stopped delivering the mail. "There is no beautiful book, I can no longer write the beautiful book."
Dense, compelling, often weirdly funny, a dark fairy tale told as a murder mystery. Rewarding and highly recommended.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2872-5
Page Count: 283
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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