Andreas’s condition does not seem authentic in this mannered treatment.
The Swiss author (stories: In Strange Gardens, 2006, etc.) examines a barren life in his latest novel.
Andreas, a German-speaking Swiss man, has been living alone in Paris for some 18 years, teaching German in a suburban school. He has been dating Nadia, who mouths off about politics and her ex-husband; funny, he never feels close to her. As a diversion he fits in Sylvie, a married woman with kids. Both women leave him feeling empty, but that’s okay; “[e]mptiness was his life in this city,” and he’s comfortable with it. His philosophy is not to get too involved in relationships, even ordinary friendships; he finds it “grotesque” that his best friend is gym teacher Jean-Marc. Returning to Switzerland for his father’s funeral, he finds he has no connection to the dead man, and is unmoved by the rituals of mourning. Religion is for the birds; the only thing he believes in is chance. In this study of anomie there are echoes of The Stranger, though Stamm’s novel has none of the power or the eventfulness of the Camus classic. Only one person has meant anything to Andreas: Fabienne, a Frenchwoman he met in his Swiss village when young. He followed her to Paris, but never declared his love. The story turns on Andreas’s persistent coughing, which leads to a biopsy. Does he have lung cancer? Declining to get the results, he decides to start over, “running away from the disease that was his life.” He quits his job, sells his apartment, dumps Nadia and Sylvie and even exhibits an entertaining mean streak. He returns to his native village with the much younger Delphine, a trainee teacher, though he doesn’t reciprocate her feelings for him, and has an inconclusive reunion with Fabienne, now a wife and mother, before he hits the road again. There is an upbeat ending which doesn’t ring true.
Andreas’s condition does not seem authentic in this mannered treatment.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59051-279-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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