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
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.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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