A flat-out masterpiece: exhilarating and unforgettable.
The impassioned memories of German twin sisters separated in childhood and ever afterward by “the silly obstacles tossed up by history”: that’s the core of this brilliant 1993 novel by a hitherto untranslated Dutch writer.
Anna and Lotte Goudriaan, born in Cologne, are effectively orphaned in early childhood (in the “Interbellum” following WWI) when their mother’s death and their father’s mortal illness send resourceful Anna to be brought up on her grandfather’s farm in a nearby village, and frail Lotte to live with an uncle’s family in the Netherlands. Except for two brief reunions before and after the subsequent war, they live far apart until the 1990s, when by sheer chance they meet again as elderly patients at a spa in Belgium. At first mutually wary, they exchange detailed memories of each other’s past: Lotte’s survival of German occupation during WWII in a household that hides fugitive Jews from the Nazis (an echo of The Diary of Anne Frank) and Anna’s more overtly dramatic life as domestic slave to her choleric relatives (at whose hands she suffers a savage beating that leaves her permanently infertile), chambermaid to an aristocratic anti-Hitler family, wife of a doomed young SS officer, and embittered Red Cross nurse during the war’s final days. De Loo quickly establishes a hypnotic narrative rhythm, juxtaposing the sisters’ richly detailed contrasting reminiscences against their tenuous renewed intimacy, eroded by Anna’s scorn for Lotte’s essentially safe passage through the crucible of conflict and the latter’s barely concealed contempt for Anna’s stubborn solidarity with “ordinary” German people. Has there ever been, one wonders, a more imaginative and moving dramatization of the human cost of the divisions and destruction wreaked by Hitler’s madness? Quite likely not. De Loo’s profoundly elegiac closing pages are a triumph of compassionate empathy, not only for both “sides,” but also for each of these magnificently realized women’s sorrows, sacrifices, and capacity to somehow endure.
A flat-out masterpiece: exhilarating and unforgettable.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56947-200-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
