Few storytellers are as at home in the fabulous, mysterious world of childhood. A major author who deserves a broad...
Omnibus edition of the beguiling, sometimes-unsettling fiction of the great Polish-Jewish writer Schulz, an early victim of the Holocaust.
Schulz has been translated into English since the early 1960s, with his book Sanitarium Under the Sign of the Hourglass included in Philip Roth’s series of Eastern European writers for Penguin. That book is translated afresh and included here along with the collection of short fiction previously issued in the U.S. as Street of Crocodiles, here presented under its original title as Cinnamon Shops. The latter title is emblematic; says the narrator, “I call them cinnamon shops because they are paneled with dark, cinnamon-colored wainscoting,” but one has the sense that the shops are so-called because cinnamon would have been an exotic import from some distant outside that magically appeared in a city center made up of strange houses with endless interiors to explore, even if the exterior might be a “market square…swept clean of dust by hot winds, like a biblical desert.” In one such house, a young man wanders the halls, visiting faraway corners and mapping a territory with “no fixed number of rooms,” where a wrong turn could lead one into “a veritable labyrinth of unfamiliar apartments and passageways” that were the domain of gigantic cockroaches and a father absorbed by books, mathematical equations, and failing health. In both collections, as well as some hitherto unpublished stories, it is clear that the father in question is often a stand-in for a remote divinity who doesn’t always do well by his charges. In obvious homage to Kafka, the father is also sometimes a victim of strange events, as when a householder turns into a crab: “Boiled, losing legs along the way, he had dragged himself onward with his remaining strength, onto his homeless journey, and we never laid eyes on him again.”
Few storytellers are as at home in the fabulous, mysterious world of childhood. A major author who deserves a broad readership, now well-served by this rich collection.Pub Date: March 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3660-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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
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