A simple story, narrated in a direct and unpretentious style: a pleasant variation on a very common theme.
First novel about the awkward coming of age of a Jewish girl at a Catholic school, and her growing friendship with a school counselor.
No, it’s not what you think: the middle-aged Al Klepatar is no Humbert Humbert preying on innocent schoolgirls—and 18-year-old Raine Rassaby is not exactly innocent, anyhow. The precocious daughter of an astronomer and a concert violinist, Raine comes from a Catholic family but decided at an early age to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps and convert to Judaism. This makes her something of an oddity at St. Ursula’s, the convent school on the West Side of Manhattan where Raine is now a senior. Even apart from her religious eccentricities Raine is a difficult student, obsessed with nuclear war and thoroughly uninterested in study, so the good sisters ask her to start seeing Mr. Klepatar for guidance. Al is charmed by Raine, but concerned at her apparent inability to find her niche in either the school or the world at large. As the story progresses Raine becomes increasingly active in politics, starting an antinuclear group at school with the help of a supportive nun and getting herself arrested at protest rallies. Her personal life is equally turbulent: Raine is in love with Pavel, a Slovakian immigrant who is studying to be a rabbi, but Pavel’s mother is horrified at the thought of her son marrying a Christian. (Raine’s mother is equally disturbed for the opposite reason.) When Raine finds herself pregnant and abandoned by Pavel, she turns to Al, who just happens to have been recently abandoned by his own wife (she left him for a younger man). Al lets Raine stay with him until the baby is born, and he tries to help her see how her life is going to change once she becomes a mother. She, in turn, manages to help Al see how his own life was changed by his marriage and its collapse.
A simple story, narrated in a direct and unpretentious style: a pleasant variation on a very common theme.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-55-9
Page Count: 264
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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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