An agreeable confection. Enjoy it for its glittering artifice, but don’t look for depth.
Could the Devil be a sweetheart? Sure, in a topsy-turvy fantasy like this one, where fruited breads and fine salamis are almost as important as the love triangle at its heart.
Schonstein-Pinnock sets her second novel (but first to appear here) in post-apartheid South Africa, in a Cape Town enclave of first-generation Italians and Jews. The story, short on plot, focuses on Primo Verona, an Italian Jew, his wife Beatrice, and another Italian Jew, Pasquale Benvenuto, the three having been best friends since childhood. Primo is a soothsayer and magician (good magic only), while Pasquale owns a deli and is known as the best baker and salami maker in Cape Town. Beatrice and Pasquale were lovers before the shy, virginal Primo proposed to Beatrice, and, after their marriage, the three still remained friends. Then, 20 years later, Pasquale pressures Beatrice to leave Primo and return to him. The magician is devastated. His spells go awry. Without meaning to, he ruins Pasquale’s business, and then, intending to summon Beatrice home, he produces the Devil instead. Surprise! Lucifer is as angelic as before his fall: Beautiful in appearance, serene in nature, still working for God, and setting limits to man’s destructiveness, he corrects Primo’s spells and restores the deliciousness of Pasquale’s breads and meats. While Schonstein-Pinnock celebrates the kitchen, she also acknowledges man’s inhumanity through flashbacks (too many of them). Primo was raised by his father and aunt, both Holocaust survivors, while Pasquale’s father, in Rome, was forced into hiding from the Gestapo. Later, Primo and Pasquale, as conscripts, witnessed atrocities during a war in Angola. A journalist enabled Aunt Lidia to survive the journey to Auschwitz by whispering stories of angels; Pasquale’s father survived confinement by listening to the food fantasies of his comrades in hiding, a butcher and a baker. Somewhat glibly, Schonstein-Pinnock sprinkles these memories like gold dust over the brutal realities faced by young woman and small boy.
An agreeable confection. Enjoy it for its glittering artifice, but don’t look for depth.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-056242-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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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