Appelfeld’s style is never flashy, but the plainness of his writing gives post-Holocaust events both starkness and power.
Prolific author Appelfeld once again delivers with a novel of great sensitivity, finely attuned to the difficulties of responding to post-Holocaust living.
The sleeping man of the title is the narrator, Erwin (later renamed Aharon), who grew up in the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe until World War II threw his survival into question (all based on facts from the author’s life). The novel opens at the end of the war, after Erwin has emerged from a cellar where he's been hiding out for two years. He drifts to Naples, bereft of family and finding in himself a weariness he cannot shake. He and some other young men are separated from the refugee camp and given military training under the tutelage of Ephraim, a charismatic leader planning to lead his cadre into the conflict in Palestine that will end up creating Israel. Not only do the men get military training, but they also learn Hebrew, for Ephraim claims that Hebrew will help bond them by “[attaching] the language to [their] bodies.” Erwin grows stronger but still feels an almost overpowering need for sleep, and this allows him the freedom to reconnect to his past through long, vivid dreams of his mother and father. Eventually, he’s wounded in action in Palestine and confined to bed. During his slow recuperation he develops the goal of becoming a writer, a profession his father had aspired to but never achieved. To this end, Erwin spends his time copying verses from the Hebrew Bible, which informs both his literary sensibility and his prose style.
Appelfeld’s style is never flashy, but the plainness of his writing gives post-Holocaust events both starkness and power.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8052-4319-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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