In this sequel to My Name is Asher Lev (1972), the author of The Chosen (1967) and Davita's Harp (1985)—as well as other fictional probes of the rich complexities of Jewish Orthodoxy—brings his protagonist artist back to the Hasidic community in Brooklyn from France. Asher had been "banished" 20 years before, and now once again he must exist between two apparently exclusive worlds: there is the sacred "world of Torah," and there is also the secular, solitary, and visionary world of the artist. Renowned painter Asher Lev, his wife Devorah (still psychically a captive of a Holocaust-crippled childhood), and a young son and daughter are in Brooklyn to participate in the mourning period for a revered uncle. Asher's father—the 89-year-old Rebbe, prime deputy for the leader of the Ladover Hasidic community—and Asher's mother are no nearer than ever to understanding Asher's deliberate turn to the "pagan" world of art. (Yet in the deceased uncle's study Asher finds a stunning collection of secular art and, from the uncle's fine and courageous mind, a gift of faith.) Through the days and nights—in the heart of the Ladovers in the States and in France—with the warm love of family, the pulsing of ritual loyalties and taboos, ripples of terror (as old fears and hatreds surface), Asher finds his "nerve ends still connected" to the community. Then, pressed between sacred and profane worlds, Asher joins in a dialectic with the riddling shades of such as Picasso, a famous sculptor, his dead uncle—and the Rebbe, both in his tiny person, or on the phone, and, at the close, after a miracle journey "in a single stride," in France. Just as magical—and disturbing—is the appearance in Asher's work of his little son's face, in the Sacrifice of Isaac. At the end, there is a linkage of worlds in a kind of redemptive sacrificial act in the gift of a son. Potok's style stiffens periodically into clumps of clichÉd settings ("in the distance a dog barked") or pokey dialogue. But, then again, there is that restless, eager journeying in the dark—and then the sudden shimmerings of possibility—in odysseys of the soul that gives Potok's spiritually searching novels their saving strength.
Pub Date: May 11, 1990
ISBN: 0449001156
Page Count: 446
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1990
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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