Goldstein expands on a story in her collection, Strange Attractors (1992), in this lively exploration of the ways chance intermingles with determinism in human lives. Sasha Saunders' beloved granddaughter is about to have a baby, and Sasha is so angry she could spit. But has Phoebe married outside her religion to deserve such derision? On the contrary: In the face of her grandmother's determined bohemianism, the delightful mathematics professor Phoebe (first seen in ``The Geometry of Soap Bubbles and Impossible Love'') has gone and married a stable Jewish computer wunderkind and settled happily into a sleepy New Jersey suburb, firmly believing that she can thus ensure a safe and happy future for her family. To explain how erroneous such a conviction can be, Sashaand the authormust go back several generations to the tiny Polish shtetl where Sasha was born, where nothing unexpected ever happened, and where Sasha's beloved sister, Fraydel, became so bored that she killed herself. Stunned, the family drifted to Warsaw, where Sasha found her calling in the chance- (or ``mazel-'') obsessed avant-garde theater. Had Fraydel not died, Sasha would never have discovered the stage, and if her grief hadn't forced her to seek comfort from Maurice, one of the theater's hangers-on, Sasha's daughter, Chloe, would never have been born. And had WW II not brought Chloe to New York, Chloe may have never conceived her own child with a professor she hardly knew, and Phoebe herself, with eyes so like Fraydel's, might never have existed. So how, her grandmother wonders, can Phoebe placidly await the birth of a son with all the confidence of her shtetl ancestors in life's predictability? Still, chance has given Phoebe a gift for finding happiness, so who's to say she's wrong? Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem, 1983, etc.) draws heavily on the themes and rhythms of Yiddish folklore while offering her own sparkling wit and philosophical insight, as always, along the way.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85648-7
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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