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DESPAIR

Name: DESPAIR
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
ISBN: 0679723439

by Vladimir Nabokov ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1966

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Despair is one of Nabokov's Russian language novels now appearing here thirty years after At was written in the Germany of the '30's— of which The Gift has been isolated by many critics as the connoisseur's choice. This perhaps as a story per se will make a stronger appeal to the general reader, even though it lacks the brilliant imaginative effects of which Nabokov is capable, or even the architectural perfection of The Defense. It's the story of a man who plans and executes his own murder— and once again obsession is as engrained here as it is in many of his stronger books. Hermann is, when first self-introduced, an inspired liar, aimless to begin with, addictive as he proceeds. He is also a dilettante perfectionist with pretensions of genius which he will achieve through his crime or perhaps its account thereof, this story. In "silly" stage asides, droll fatuities, wordplay, he records his meeting with the man who As his exact likeness and whom he eventually will kill. He gets rid of the artist, his "bird-witted" wife Lydia's housepet, persuades Lydia and then the victim to go along with him. The despair— that is the supreme irony. But before the story ends on that note, there have been a great many sardonic subtleties along with the interior echoes, vagaries, illusions of a mind precariously poised between reality and disassociation. Occasionally there is a matchless line— "A cloud every now and then palmed the sun which reappeared like a conjurer's coin." But on the whole, the tone As more playful than any of Nabokov's books, classing it as an entertainment. Nonetheless, Nabokov is one of the incomparable storytellers and stylists of our time who may outlive it.

Pub Date: June 15, 1966

ISBN: 0679723439

Page Count: 244

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1966

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THINK, WRITE, SPEAK
by Vladimir Nabokov ; edited by Brian Boyd & Anastasia Tolstoy

- BOOK REVIEW
LETTERS TO VÉRA
by Vladimir Nabokov ; edited by Olga Voronina & Brian Boyd ; translated by Olga Voronina & Brian Boyd

- BOOK REVIEW
THE TRAGEDY OF MISTER MORN
by Vladimir Nabokov & translated by Thomas Karshan ; Anastasia Tolstoy

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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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

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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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.