THE WEATHER IN BERLIN

Name: THE WEATHER IN BERLIN
Author: Ward Just
ISBN: 0-618-03668-7

by Ward Just ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2002

A symphony of reverie, vivid symbolic statement, and unsparing sociohistorical and self-analysis. Just has never done...

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A film director’s late-life odyssey toward self-understanding is viewed from an impressive variety of perspectives in this 13th novel from the former Washington journalist (Lowell Limpett, 2001, etc.).

Just’s protagonist is Dixon Greenwood, who won brief fame during the “golden age” of American movies (late 1960s–early ’70s) with his cult classic feature Summer, 1921, a sexually forthright portrayal of German artists between the two world wars. “Dix” is haunted by the crisis that occurred during filming: the inexplicable disappearance of young actress Jana Sorb, long since presumed dead. Thirty years later, Dix accepts a three-month “residence” in Berlin, where an interview with an archivist (for “an oral history on moviemaking”) triggers detailed memories (rendered in staggered flashbacks) of his life, loves, and career—while meeting with local artists and intellectuals; adjusting to Berlin’s “gray,” bleak climate; and eventually persuading himself to guest-direct an episode of Wannsee 1899, a popular TV costume drama that romantically portrays “German life at the turn of the century.” A surprise visitor from his past alters Dix’s preconceptions and perceptions, forcing him to confront his own history as a manipulator (and, to some extent, an exploiter), as well as the irony of presuming to “direct” other people’s lives and fates. Just has packed much of a lifetime’s experience and observation into this survey of a chaotic century’s jagged momentum, and the meditative rhythms grow increasingly seductive. Past and present are seamlessly conjoined, and Dix’s conflicted epiphanies are realized in several brilliant set pieces, including a marvelous sequence in a Berlin café where Dix and two German women acquaintances are served by a sardonically polite Vietnamese waiter; and the account of Dix’s half-willing participation in the shooting of a wounded, cornered wild boar.

A symphony of reverie, vivid symbolic statement, and unsparing sociohistorical and self-analysis. Just has never done anything better.

Pub Date: June 3, 2002

ISBN: 0-618-03668-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EASTERN SHORE
by Ward Just

- BOOK REVIEW
AMERICAN ROMANTIC
by Ward Just

- BOOK REVIEW
RODIN'S DEBUTANTE
by Ward Just

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.