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ISOLDE

Name: ISOLDE
Author: Irina Odoevtseva
ISBN: 978-1-78227-477-3

by Irina Odoevtseva ; translated by Bryan Karetnyk & Irina Steinberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2019

A chilling pleasure.

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First published in 1929 but only just translated into English, Russian novelist/poet/playwrite/memoirist Odoevtseva’s arresting tale of teenage Russian expats living in France is as dark as it is dreamy.

The book was not an instant hit when it was first published in Paris, where Odoevtseva, like her characters, had fled to escape the Russian Revolution. Among the critical charges against it: It abused “sexual spice”; it was “dry”; it stereotyped the English; it had lesbian overtones. It was, co-translator Karetnyk writes in his engaging introduction, “all much too modern, much too European, much too explicit, much too close to the bone.” Indeed, it is all of those things, which is exactly what makes it great; the setting may be dated, but the writing, as translated by Karetnyk and Steinberg, is arrestingly contemporary. When we first meet 14-year-old Liza, the heart and center of the novel, it is on the beach in Biarritz, and we see her through the eyes of a wealthy British boy named Cromwell, who falls in love with her immediately and renames her Isolde, to his Tristan. Men fall in love with Liza—it’s just what they do—though except for declaring their devotion, they rarely engage with who she is. Cromwell, the most earnest of the bunch, is a pleasant distraction for both her and her plotting older brother, Nikolai, both of whom bask in his affections and his cash. When the family returns to Paris in the fall, Liza reunites with her boyfriend, Andrei—Cromwell, after all, was just a sweet diversion—but finds herself increasingly uneasy, on the cusp of adulthood, longing still for the half-imaginary Moscow of her youth. When Nikolai and Andrei hatch a plot, using naïve Liza as a pawn, the doom that has been hovering over the novel comes to violent fruition, although the real action all takes place offstage. The novel might have been a moralistic tale about an abandoned generation; instead, because of Liza, it is captivating: Underneath her shallow mania is real complexity, and while Odoevtseva’s portrait of adolescence is disturbing, it is also very funny, a ray of light cutting through the misery of an otherwise dark world.

A chilling pleasure.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-78227-477-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Pushkin Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.