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GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS

Name: GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS
Author: John Updike
ISBN: 0-375-40908-4

by John Updike ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2000

One of Updike’s more intriguing experiments – but not one of his successes. (Book-of-the-Month main selection)

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A risky and ultimately unsatisfying departure from what we’ve come to think of as Updike’s distinctive territory: suburbia and its discontents.

Here, he retells the story of Hamlet’s mother, the adulterous queen, and her brother-in-law and lover, in the years leading to Prince “Amleth’s” return from college in Wittenberg, to bury his father and attend the marriage of his mother and uncle. Updike’s sources include Shakespeare’s primary one, Saxo Grammaticus’ 12th-century Historia Danica, as well as Hamlet itself, from which he quotes sporadically (noting, for instance, that the lovers exchange “reechy kisses”). The novel is best in its first half: a clever re-creation of late medieval Scandinavia’s tangled power struggles and of the austere court of famed warrior Horwendil the Jute, who wed reluctant young “Gerutha” and became king of Denmark (then Zealand) upon her father’s death. The sly figure of Horwendil’s “dark” brother Feng(on), a “freelance” adventurer whose tales of foreign lands seduce Gerutha (exactly as Othello’s enchanted Desdemona) into intimacy, is quite convincingly evoked. Alas, once Gerutha and “Feng” (later Gertrude and Claudius, for reasons only partially spelt out) hit the sheets (this is Updike, after all), the hitherto lean and credibly stately prose often becomes, if not quite royal, certifiably purple (“Surges of sensation in her lower parts lifted her so high her voice was flung from her like a bird’s lost call”). It isn’t all risible, though. Long restrained tensions between “King Hamlet” (his name likewise having changed) and the wily Feng explode in a taut confrontation scene. Gertrude’s transformation from unwilling bride to weary, guilt-ridden matron is deftly traced. And the offstage presence, as it were, of her brooding, “theatrical” son – an aggrieved time bomb ticking steadily away – is expertly sketched in. Yet the abrupt inconclusive ending (even though we know precisely what’s to come) is almost certainly a mistake.

One of Updike’s more intriguing experiments – but not one of his successes. (Book-of-the-Month main selection)

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-40908-4

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ALWAYS LOOKING
by John Updike edited by Christopher Carduff

- BOOK REVIEW
HIGHER GOSSIP
by John Updike edited by Christopher Carduff

- BOOK REVIEW
MY FATHER’S TEARS
by John Updike

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

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New York Times Bestseller

Booker Prize Winner

THE TESTAMENTS

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019

Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

GET IT

New York Times Bestseller

Booker Prize Winner

Atwood goes back to Gilead.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.

Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Nan A. Talese

Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

Categories:

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | LITERARY FICTION | DYSTOPIAN FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE 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

- SEEN & HEARD
Bernardine Evaristo Shares Booker Prize with Atwood

- SEEN & HEARD
Split Booker Prize Drawing Backlash

- SEEN & HEARD
Margaret Atwood Honored by Queen

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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.