An elegant novel of ideas concerning decidedly inelegant topics, empathetic but unforgiving.
A pensive, provocative novel of history, memory, and our endlessly blood-soaked times by one of the foremost writers to have emerged from the former Yugoslavia.
“Andreas Ban feeds himself with other people’s lives on his journey towards death, that most powerful goddess of ultimate oblivion,” writes Croatian novelist Drndic (Leica Format, 2015, etc.). Ban has retreated from psychological practice after finally despairing of figuring people out, has retreated from writing after running out of things to say, but he has not stopped visiting the past. Once familiar with every corner of Paris and New York, he now lives in a provincial town on the Adriatic coast, slowly falling apart and, in his disintegration, quite obviously hastening toward death; now he is living with memories, recalling “old friendships, dead loves, abandoned towns, books, books, real and unreal characters….” As he remembers, as he sifts through all those books and his files, he makes one troubling connection after another. An exile from the town dreams of murdering his father, who in turn has taken part in the murder of its Jews, all of which, remembering, Ban cannot corroborate because everyone involved is long dead; a superb director whose films he admires turns out to have made a hateful pro-Nazi film during the war, then, soon after, a socialist-realist homage to Yugoslavia’s Communist regime without missing a step; and so on. “How can it be, one minute this, the next that?” It is all enough to drive Ban to distraction, along with his steadily dissolving vertebrae and what he is sure is a lurking cancer. There are remedies: he can stop thinking, stop remembering, stop accumulating odd bits of knowledge on the shape of ears, the habits of lobsters, depression among zoo animals, and so on, and slip away. Or he can take matters into his own hands, whence the title of Drndic’s book, which, though somber, ends on an unexpectedly hopeful note.
An elegant novel of ideas concerning decidedly inelegant topics, empathetic but unforgiving.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2721-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
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