A challenge for readers unused to endless sentences and unbroken paragraphs but worth the slog for its wealth of ideas.
A daunting experimental novel by Hungarian writer Krasznahorkai (The World Goes On, 2017, etc.), who blends his trademark interests in philosophy and apocalypse.
The baron of the title is an “unspeakably elegant” member of the erstwhile Habsburg nobility of Hungary who has been living in exile in Argentina until, finally, his debts at the casino catch up to him. Nostalgic and elderly, though still given to dandyish ways, he returns to the countryside haunts of his youth, hoping along the way to rekindle a long-ago romance with a woman whom, late in the story, a factotum likens to Cervantes’ Dulcinea del Toboso. The baron is no Quixote, though the Hungary to which he returns has no end of windmills against which to tilt—including oil derricks everywhere. Krasznahorkai fills his pages with knowing nods to European nationalism: An Austrian train conductor, for instance, sniffs that “even they”—the Hungarians on the other side of the border—“had been trying to conform to European standards” when it came to safety, schedule, and other things train conductors are supposed to worry about. The baron cuts a memorable figure, but the real star of Krasznahorkai’s story is a philosopher who has cut himself off from society and lives in hermitage in a forest park, concerned with problems of being and nonbeing: “Everything is a kind of philosophical boxing match that leads only to non-existence, and this is, in all likelihood, the greatest error of existence.” Even the erstwhile professor has his prejudices, grumbling along with the townsfolk about the gypsies who have dared pitch their own camp nearby. Krasznahorkai tends to long, digressive passages that build on and allude to other pieces, and the word “non-existence" turns up often enough to suggest a theme. But no matter: In the end, the worlds the philosopher, the baron, and other characters inhabit are slated to disappear in a wall of flame, an apocalypse that, as Krasznahorkai assures, is not just physical and actual, but also existential.
A challenge for readers unused to endless sentences and unbroken paragraphs but worth the slog for its wealth of ideas.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2664-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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