Translator Steven deserves almost as much praise as does the remarkable author of this enormous, challenging, life-affirming...
Deracinated, incomplete people undertake interlocking quests for human connection and self-realization.
This epic Norwegian novel, a major European bestseller and prizewinner, is a complex mosaic tracing the lives of several generations of the Nilsens, a fragmented Oslo family, throughout the WWII years and afterward. Christensen’s narrator is Barnum Nilsen, a physically stunted, alcoholic, melancholic scriptwriter who attempts to make sense of his hollow life by assembling a context for it from stories half-told and imperfectly remembered by his distracted forebears and single estranged sibling. The latter is his older half-brother Fred: the product of their mother Vera’s rape by a German soldier, who grew up an angry malcontent (and, incidentally, accomplished boxer), a willfully mute vagabond bent on understanding himself by researching the misadventures of his great-grandfather Willem, vanished during a voyage to Greenland. The former are the unstable Vera herself, her alcoholic mother Boletta, and her maternal grandmother (“the Old One”), a former silent-film star lost in memories of her bygone youth, beauty, and fame. Another narrative and thematic strand explores the past of Barnum’s father Arnold, an itinerant con man who charmed the ingenuous Vera with tales of his youthful adventures, climaxed by joining a circus. It is in fact the lesson Arnold learned under the Big Top (“Imagination is the greatest thing there is!”) that fuels Barnum’s passion to examine every facet of his own past and heritage, in effect curing his own depression and despair by freeing and exercising his imagination. Christensen’s intense saga (with intermittent echoes of such ambitious predecessors as Grass’s The Tin Drum and Michel Tournier’s The Ogre) is both an arduous read (owing to numerous long run-on sentences) and a thrilling and stimulating black comedy that shows, unforgettably, how art—and understanding—are shaped out of pain and suffering.
Translator Steven deserves almost as much praise as does the remarkable author of this enormous, challenging, life-affirming masterpiece.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-55970-715-1
Page Count: 696
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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