Blurring the edges between history and fiction, this achingly mournful work impresses with its grave empathy.
A celebrated Israeli novelist’s visit to Amsterdam, the city where he was born, triggers the search for his origins that—unknowingly—he has been waiting to make his entire life.
Paying thoughtful homage to the Jews of Amsterdam, trapped in the Nazis' inexorable vise of persecution, Israeli writer Elon (If You Awaken Love, 2007, etc.) has composed a story of love, loss, and yearning, expressed through the creation of a novel within a novel. Her central character, writer Yoel Blum, was instructed by his mother never to visit the city from which she, Yoel, and his sister fled, but after her death he makes the trip and accidentally sees a clip of prewar film that opens up questions of identity he feels compelled to explore. So Yoel settles in Amsterdam, in a tacky hotel right near the hospital where he was born, and begins to accumulate notes for a novel through which he will try to make sense of the past. This second story features Sonia, a mother, and her two children, Nettie and Leo, characters who both animate Yoel’s knowledge of the past and accompany him into the present as he wanders the streets, accumulating information, acquaintances, and atmosphere, while slowly coming to terms with the truth. Heavily shadowed with the creeping horrors of the Holocaust—in particular the heart-wrenching choice to hide children and the consequences of that choice—the novel is given weight by its focus on Yoel’s psychology and the mood of a beautiful capital flowing with symbolic dark water. Lyrically phrased and often powerfully visual, the novel has a slow pace, unlike other, perhaps more conventional war stories. However, this deeply felt tale offers a rewarding meditation on survival and on digesting the emotional burdens freely or unknowingly carried.
Blurring the edges between history and fiction, this achingly mournful work impresses with its grave empathy.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3022-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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