Not a Holocaust memoir or historical fiction but a skillful reconstruction of a life that strides the two genres. (3 b&w...
A hauntingly fetching book, centered on one teenage girl’s avoidable death.
Modiano’s novel Out of the Dark (1998) is also a short, nostalgic work fixated on a woman. This work is even darker, in that it weaves research, logical speculation, and emotive imagination around a Jewish girl who runs away from the convent school that is hiding her and soon disappears in Auschwitz via Drancy. Modiano’s obsessive search began about ten years ago when he saw an old 1941 newspaper notice about a missing 15-year-old girl named Dora Bruder. Using the powerful description that makes him a noted novelist in his native France (“the black interminable wall, the penumbra beneath the metro arches”), Modiano goes to the listed address and to many uncooperative offices to follow the paper trail, the bureaucratic banality of evil, that leads to Bruder’s bolting from her tedious but safe hiding place during the Nazi occupation. The tragedy took place in parts of Paris familiar to the author, though much has changed in 50 years, “and it takes time for what has been erased to resurface.” What resurfaces through months of patient investigation are details about Dora’s parents and his own Jewish father, who abandoned the family, with speculation placing Dora and his father in the same predicament. Beyond the guesswork, like describing Mr. Bruder’s likely battles during five years with the French Foreign Legion, Modiano comes up with a few photos of Dora and her family and interviews a few survivors that knew the family. The author combines empathy and facts to see the suicidal ecstasy of Dora running away and hiding out on the wintry Parisian streets until her documented arrest and transport to oblivion.
Not a Holocaust memoir or historical fiction but a skillful reconstruction of a life that strides the two genres. (3 b&w photos, 2 maps)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 978-0520214262
Page Count: 123
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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