THE PRISONER

Name: THE PRISONER
Author: Marcel Proust
ISBN: 978-0-14-313359-9

by Marcel Proust ; translated by Carol Clark ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 8, 2019

A classic work of early modernist literature given new life, thereby to fuel a new conversation about the book and its...

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American edition of the “new,” non-Moncrieff translation of Proust’s posthumous novel, a story and a metastory alike that are full of tangles.

Copyright snags kept the British retranslation of The Prisoner from appearing in the U.S. for a full 16 years after being published in the U.K., but that’s only the beginning of a minor saga. Famously neurasthenic and agoraphobic, Proust died before this book appeared, and it hadn’t been part of the original plan for what became the six-volume In Search of Lost Time in any event. Had he been alive, writes translator Clark, “the book would have been considerably different from the one we have now.” She only begins to suggest those differences, but one wonders whether the already shrouded relationship Proust describes between his narrator, in many respects a stand-in for himself, and the rough-edged orphan Albertine might have been obscured even further, for while there is sex, there is no union and no clear reason why Albertine should have come to live with the narrator and his mother in the first place, Mama having perhaps been made nervous at the thought “that by expressing any reservations about the girl to whom I said I was going to become engaged, she might cast a shadow over my future life…perhaps lead me to reproach myself, once she was gone, for having hurt her by marrying Albertine.” It’s all very mysterious, for Albertine comes and goes, as do other characters who figure in the saga, such as M. de Charlus and the Duchesse de Guermantes; yet, each is there at exactly the right time. Proust, sharp-eyed and thinly veiled, writes here of the widespread acceptance of anti-Semitism and nationalism, there of sexual desire and its discontents (“It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, condemned, covered in shame, that is the real homosexuality”), and always, always, of his Garbo-esque desire to be left alone.

A classic work of early modernist literature given new life, thereby to fuel a new conversation about the book and its author in a decidedly different world.

Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-14-313359-9

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
LETTERS TO HIS NEIGHBOR
by Marcel Proust ; translated by Lydia Davis

- BOOK REVIEW
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
by Marcel Proust & translated by John Sturrock

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GUERMANTES WAY
by Marcel Proust & translated by Mark Treharne

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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.