Despite Mercier’s (Perlmann’s Silence, 2012, etc.) lyricism and occasional emotional acuity, the book's depiction of...
Two men from Bern who can no longer trust their hands—one is a recently retired surgeon who can't hold a scalpel without trembling and the other can't hold a steering wheel without contemplating suicide—meet by chance in a cafe in Provence.
Both are also wifeless fathers to grown daughters from whom they are estranged, or worse. Adrian Herzog, the novel’s narrator, soon learns that his new acquaintance, Martijn van Vliet, is reeling from his daughter Lea’s death. The strangers quickly bond as van Vliet tells the story of Lea’s descent due to an unnamed mental illness, beginning with the time the father and then-8-year-old girl encountered an enigmatic masked woman playing the violin in a train station. As they listened, van Vliet grew convinced that this woman’s playing had managed to pierce the armor of grief his young daughter had worn since her mother’s death a year earlier. He concludes that in this moment a "new will had formed" inside her, a will toward life, betraying her intense desire to learn to play the violin. Her knack for the instrument develops into an obsession for the pair and eventually a glamorous career for Lea—that is, until her breakdown. Van Viet tells his story with the fear that what he once considered the only way for his daughter to overcome her grief may well have been what destroyed her. Above all, he's desperate to believe in his own innocence as a father and finds in Herzog an exceedingly eager and compassionate listener. The relationship that develops between the two men is well-wrought and their subtle affinities numerous, but the book lacks a probing analysis of the father-daughter relationship. Van Vliet admits that he imagined his daughter "a fairy by nature," and her characterization is reminiscent of Romantic tropes: a precocious prodigy, a frigid and fragile "countess…unaware of her aura." Needless to say, she doesn’t speak much in her father’s tale, apart from uttering imperious commands in French. The moments later meant to signify her mental break fall flat, even in scenes meant to depict her rage. This lack is exacerbated by moments of sexist and racist outbursts from the protagonist. For instance, van Vliet says of a co-worker: "I destroyed Ruth Adamek, who had never forgiven me for not falling for her miniskirt," and frequently refers to his daughter’s psychologist as "the Maghrebi" who would cast him "black, Arab looks."
Despite Mercier’s (Perlmann’s Silence, 2012, etc.) lyricism and occasional emotional acuity, the book's depiction of suffering does little to elaborate its closing observation that "there is unhappiness of a dimension so great that it is unbearable."Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2166-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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