Not Voinovich’s very best, but a welcome addition to a brilliantly subversive and hugely entertaining body of work.
The great Russian satirist (Moscow 2042, 1987, etc.) observes a devoted Stalinist’s difficult passage through the years that follow the toppling of her idol.
When Khruschchev’s 1962 speech denounces Stalin for anti-Leninist tendencies, former District Party Secretary Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina cries foul. A true believer of formidable steadfastness, Aglaya had even, during the glorious war years, blown up her husband Andrei in an explosion engineered to repel German invaders. Removed from her post by newer apparatchiks, Aglaya broods, frets, meditates revenge—and when the statue of Stalin installed at her behest in her hometown of Dolgov is slated for demolition, Aglaya persuades a phlegmatic tractor-driver to deliver the cast-iron monument to her apartment. Voinovich, a character in his own novel, chats amiably with the reader as he explores Aglaya’s subsequent adventures and relationships, offering deadpan deconstructions of all things Soviet, while referring readers (really quite a bit too coyly) to his earlier books—notably his classic Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1976). This frequently palls, but Voinovich offers a beguiling host of vividly imagined supporting characters, including Aglaya’s nemesis Shubkin, a labor camp survivor and novelist (and Solzhenitsyn caricature) whose inflammatory novella The Timber Camp makes him both famous and notorious; wily political survivor Admiral Makarov; idealistic war hero (and Aglaya’s aging admirer) General Burdalakov; and, in the climactic subplot that shapes the explosive climax, wounded Afghan War veteran and dedicated terrorist Vanka Zhukov. Monumental Propaganda meanders, but is solidified by its ferocious comic concentration on Aglaya’s zealous love for the good old days of benevolent despotism (when advised her homeland has embraced democracy, she incredulously cries,” And you say they don’t put anyone in jail?”), capped by her final feverish “embrace” of her beloved leader.
Not Voinovich’s very best, but a welcome addition to a brilliantly subversive and hugely entertaining body of work.Pub Date: July 20, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41235-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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