Although too long and overly slavish to the record, this multifaceted portrait rescues its heroine from undeserved obscurity.
The glamorous and fraught life of a Russian aristocrat who survives war, revolution, and several difficult relationships.
This massive novel, based on the life of a real woman, represents a huge amount of research by Lapierre (Between Love and Honor, 2012, etc.), as recorded in her substantial bibliography. Maria Ignatievna Benckendorff nee Zakrevskaya, known as Moura, is precociously intellectual, a young doyenne of imperial Russian society. When she marries her first husband, Ivan “Djon” Benckendorff, a Russian Estonian nobleman, she follows him to Berlin, where she becomes the belle of the czar’s diplomatic corps. Then, after the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution, the glittering world Moura knew lies in ruins. She manages to survive by her prodigious wits, her fluency in several languages, and her appeal to men. Scrabbling in Saint Petersberg, Moura is separated from her children, who are consigned to what’s left of Djon’s Estonian estate after his assassination. Among her conquests are Robert Lockhart, a British agent implicated in a plot against Lenin; Maxim Gorky, the writer who narrowly escaped several purges; and H.G. Wells. The novel has all the earmarks of an exhaustive biography, with quotations from original sources—correspondence, diaries, and press clippings—often taking over the narration. The real Moura kept much close to the vest, including the details of an ordeal in a Bolshevik prison. Lapierre respects Moura’s privacy by not imagining the experience—but shouldn’t fiction free an author from such scruples? Likewise, on the “hypothetical” question of whether Moura was a Soviet spy, a British spy, or both, Lapierre lets the truth interfere with a good story—fictional Moura never acknowledges, not even to herself, that she’s an informant. Nevertheless, as history brought to life through the eyes of one woman whose fortunes took her through two wars and tumultuous regime changes, this account is engrossing, especially as to the particulars of existence in a paranoid, post-revolutionary state with a bureaucratic machine as deadly as it is dysfunctional.
Although too long and overly slavish to the record, this multifaceted portrait rescues its heroine from undeserved obscurity.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9791-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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