Should help to consolidate Grøndahl’s following among English-speaking readers.
A marriage crumbles after 30 years, allowing the wife to find her own identity at last in this elegiac, maturely affecting work from the masterly Danish novelist (Lucca, 2003, etc.).
The discovery of a conversation recorded by accident (or was it?) on their phone machine between her banker husband, Martin, and his lover, Susanne, does not surprise 56-year-old Irene Beckman, a Copenhagen divorce lawyer. Apparently she never loved Martin, nor did she dwell that much on her marriage, being of a rather skeptical, diffident nature. She even enjoyed an affair of her own some years back. Irene says nothing, until sometime later when Martin announces at the dinner table in front of their grown children, Josephine and Peter, that he’s going to live with the other woman. Curiously, their marriage is the last to disintegrate among their crowd, who lived through a turbulent, revolutionary era. Nonetheless, Irene feels bewildered and angry. With Martin’s exit, she’s finally forced to try to understand herself, further prodded by a notebook thrust upon her by her hospitalized mother, Vivian. Written just after the birth of Irene and her twin brother (who died), the notebook reveals that Irene’s real father is a Russian-Jewish cellist named Samuel Balkin, who left for Sweden during WWII and didn’t return until after Vivian had married someone else. Unhinged by her “strange sense of freedom,” Irene sets off by car to search for Balkin in Vienna, where a strange, bittersweet reunion ensues. Grøndahl makes some lengthy, sinuous digressions into various tertiary characters’ backgrounds and suggests a bit heavy-handedly that Irene has subconsciously sought her twin in her lovers. Yet by the end of this quietly emotive, intelligent work, the reader is exhausted and transformed.
Should help to consolidate Grøndahl’s following among English-speaking readers.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-101043-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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