No big points made here, just strong storytelling combined with thoughtful exploration of difficult issues.
A necklace with a peacock pendant raises provocative questions about loss, guilt and recovery in Waldman’s intriguing new novel (Red Hook Road, 2010, etc.).
The necklace is one of thousands of items confiscated from Hungary’s Jews and found on a train seized in Austria by the U.S. Army in 1945. Assigned to guard the train, Lt. Jack Wiseman falls in love with Ilona, a Holocaust survivor. When she leaves him for a new life in Palestine, the devastated Jack takes the necklace as a memento. In 2013, dying of pancreatic cancer, he asks his granddaughter Natalie to return it. But to whom? She learns in Budapest that the necklace was depicted in Portrait of Frau E, a lost painting by a Hungarian Jewish artist who died during World War II. Amitai, an Israeli-born specialist in the recovery of art stolen during the Holocaust, persuades Natalie to join his search for Portrait of Frau E in hopes of identifying the necklace’s rightful owner. Painting and necklace both wind up in unexpected hands, and the narrative rolls back to trace the history of “Frau E.” Her maiden name is Nina Schillinger, and in 1913 she is a 19-year-old feminist whose desire to study medicine has prompted her appalled parents to send her to a psychoanalyst. (His account of their sessions provides a wickedly funny satire of sexist, sex-obsessed Freudian analysis.) Waldman paints morally complex portraits in her three linked stories. Jack’s superiors blithely furnish their quarters with tableware and crystal from the Hungarian train; the appealing Amitai retrieves looted art for profit; Budapest’s prewar Jewish bourgeoisie places crippling constraints on its daughters. Yet all three stories also show love prompting people to transcend their limitations and behave with new compassion, though Waldman is too honest not to acknowledge that it’s not always easy to do the right thing—or even to know what that is.
No big points made here, just strong storytelling combined with thoughtful exploration of difficult issues.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53354-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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