By turns devastating and otherworldly, Morante’s novel is a classic, and Goldstein’s new translation should return to it the...
A postwar novel about a boy, his father, and their isolated world.
Arturo, a young boy, grows up on the island of Procida alone. His mysterious father comes and goes at will. Arturo’s mother died in childbirth, and, because their home’s previous inhabitant hated women and, so the story goes, left a curse on the rambling, disintegrating structure, they’ve been unable to hire any women to cook, to clean, or to raise Arturo. So Arturo spends his time alone, rambling along the beach and reading books about the glories of adventure and war. More than anything, Arturo worships his father, a cold, scornful, and often cruel man. When Arturo is 14, his father brings home a young bride, Nunziata, a plain girl only a few years older than Arturo, who grew up poor in nearby Naples. Then he takes off, leaving Arturo and Nunziata alone together for long stretches of time. Morante (1912-1985; Aracoeli, 1984, etc.), once considered the premier Italian writer of her generation, first published this novel in 1957, and it won her the Premio Strega, a major Italian literary prize. This lovely new translation by Goldstein, known for her work on Elena Ferrante and Primo Levi, will hopefully go a long way toward re-establishing Morante’s reputation among English-speaking readers. It’s a magnificent novel, breathtaking in its psychological acuity. Like Don Quixote and Emma Bovary before him, Arturo has formed his romantic views of life from books. His maturation—and accompanying disappointments, even betrayals—is deeply painful. So are the complicated relationships depicted here: between Arturo and his father, Nunziata and her husband, and Nunziata and Arturo. But there are moments, too, of striking beauty. Arturo’s early ramblings on the island have an unearthly quality, as ethereal as the later sections are grounded and precise. Morante’s style might seem old-fashioned, at first, to contemporary readers, but they’d do well to overcome that initial impression. The book is brimful with insight and with beauty.
By turns devastating and otherworldly, Morante’s novel is a classic, and Goldstein’s new translation should return to it the attention it deserves.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-329-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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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