As fascinating and tangled as an old woman’s fireside reminiscences: a jumbled mosaic of memories folded into the history of...
A wide-ranging portrait of Soviet and pre-Soviet society and history as seen by an elderly matriarch living on the shores of the Crimean Sea. The second English-language appearance from the celebrated Russian geneticist-turned-novelist (The Funeral Party, 2001).
Although it weighs in at just over 300 pages, the story has a Tolstoyan heft to it, not only in its seriousness but in the dizzying array of characters who wander in and out. The heart of the tale is Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez, now (in the 1970s) a widow of more than 20 years. Born in the 1890s to a Greek family that had settled many generations earlier in a Crimean village, Medea was a freethinking young woman who became enamored of Communism long before the 1917 revolution. Her late husband Samuel Mendez, a Jew who became one of the first Party members in Russia, was an officer in a special detachment of the Red Army. Although he left Medea childless, she had a large extended family and many friends, and her house on the Crimean is always crowded now with visitors during the summer holiday season. There is Medea’s childhood playmate Elena, who married Medea’s brother: She came from a wealthy Armenian family, and her father supported Medea and her 12 brothers and sisters after both of their parents died young. Elena’s son Georgii is also a summer visitor. Then there is Medea’s younger sister Alexandra, who married Ivan Isaevich and had a daughter they named Nike, a great favorite of Medea’s. Nike is inseparable from her childhood friend Masha, who grew up to marry Valerii Butonov, a famous athlete and circus performer who became a physician. This is a story of recollection, unfolding backwards as the arrival of Medea’s guests recalls events long past but far from forgotten.
As fascinating and tangled as an old woman’s fireside reminiscences: a jumbled mosaic of memories folded into the history of an age—striking, but badly out of focus.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-8052-4196-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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
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