An exciting, pithy translation that will surely leave readers electrified and wanting to read more of Saba's work.
Set at the cusp of the 20th century, Saba’s story takes the reader into the mind of a teenager in small-town Trieste, Italy.
Living at home with his mother and aunt, 16-year-old Ernesto is an apprentice to become a flour merchant. As a worker, he is frustrated, angry, and, most of all, hungry. Saba (Songbook: The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba, 2009, etc.) began writing this novel in 1953 but hadn't completed it by the time he died in 1957 at age 74. Written in three episodes, the story follows Ernesto's involvement with an older co-worker (“The Man”) to the point of jeopardizing his job, his relationship with his mother, and his own sanity. The Man propositions Ernesto in the opening scene of the book. Curious and desired, Ernesto agrees to various episodes of sex, at times playful but also violent, on top of the haystack while the boss is out. These moments catapult Ernesto into a world of confusion. As he navigates a complicated, lukewarm relationship with his mother, Ernesto is guilt-ridden about what has occurred (and keeps occurring). Interspersed through these scenes are interjections by the author, who can’t help but provide contextual notes to what he has written—almost to justify his text by providing more depth to his characters: “Of course, there were other reasons too, deeper ones, but [Ernesto] wasn’t aware of them.” Ernesto’s character is captivating, and it's clear that the author poured his heart out in creating him. In her introduction, translator Gilson (Ms. Juvenal, 2014, etc.) explains the deep relationship the author developed with Ernesto, and this love seeps through the sentences—a complicated love that puts up with Ernesto’s thoughts and whims and that, at times, tires Saba. As he wrote in a one-page section called "Almost a Conclusion": “Add to those pages, Ernesto’s breakthrough to his true calling, and you would in fact, have the complete story of his adolescence. Unfortunately, the author is too old, too weary and embittered to summon up the strength to write all that.”
An exciting, pithy translation that will surely leave readers electrified and wanting to read more of Saba's work.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68137-082-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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