Minor work from a major writer.
An ill-fated love affair symbolizes the chaos of contemporary Balkan politics in the latest novel from the acclaimed Albanian author (The Ghost Rider, 2010, etc.) who was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Literature in 2005.
It begins as what seems to be a political thriller, in the immediate aftermath of a fatal taxicab accident on the Vienna Autobahn. Separate investigations are conducted by the governments of Albania and Serbia, as the two passengers killed were Albanians (and, as hastily gathered documentary evidence suggests, lovers who met frequently over a span of 12 years). The surviving cabdriver confesses he might have been distracted by catching sight of the couple “trying to kiss.” But it’s apparent that much more intimacy than that was shared by Besfort Y., a government operative employed by the Council of Europe and somehow involved with war-crimes trials then proceeding at The Hague, and his putative mistress Rovena, an intern at the Albanian Archaeological Institute. Summaries of investigative reports are juxtaposed with an unidentified “researcher’s” imagined history of the couple’s unequal relationship, as evidence implies a pattern of dominance and submission enacted by the sometimes cruel Besfort and the essentially passive Rovena. The enigma remains modestly intriguing throughout, yet the novel is anything but a thriller. Neither character, as seen in retrospective (and often flawed) remembrance and in speculation, is given enough life—or even specificity of detail—to elicit much reader interest; it’s as if we’re invited to empathize with chess pieces. The novel comes alive, fitfully, only when Kadare ingeniously connects the couple’s deathward progression with motifs from indigenous history and folklore (a device that is always one of the author’s greatest strengths).
Minor work from a major writer.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2995-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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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