Though the prose doesn’t set off sparks, Baeurdick finds an off-kilter way to explore a dour period in history.
A busy, lightly absurdist coming-of-age tale driven by the confusions of communism, religion and the space race.
Bauerdick doesn’t say in which country his debut novel is set, but the small town tucked near a Carpathian mountainside is plainly Romanian. The story opens in 1957, as young narrator Pavel observes his family and neighbors dispute the meaning of the second Sputnik launch. Communism thus far has been a distant drumbeat in the town of Baia Luna, but its threats soon draw closer: The local priest is found murdered, and Pavel’s teacher is discovered hanged. What ensues is largely a detective story, led by Pavel, involving the sexual peccadillos of Communist Party functionaries, complete with sordid photos and anguished diary entries. He won’t grasp the full extent of the drama till communism’s fall three decades later, but the story is leavened by a subplot involving Pavel’s grandfather’s determination to understand the fate of the Virgin Mary. In numerous set pieces, he argues with a local Gypsy about whether the holy mother ascended to the moon and whether the U.S. and Soviet space missions are really just efforts to prove (or disprove) her existence. As the men hunker down over Bibles and telescopes, Bauerdick reveals the bubble of ignorance that surrounded those living under communism, and he explores the push and pull between faith and growing totalitarianism. Bauerdick, via Dollenmayer’s translation, is a plainspoken writer, not given to metaphorical language or lyrical turns of phrase, and some plot turns feel baggy and overwritten. However, the novel captures the way communism slowly ground down its subjects, yet it doesn't feel like a falsely inflated epic, and the comic passages involving Pavel’s grandfather give the story a likable, quirky tone.
Though the prose doesn’t set off sparks, Baeurdick finds an off-kilter way to explore a dour period in history.Pub Date: July 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-59412-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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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