An unusual and intriguing book, and a welcome introduction to the work of a neglected 20th-century master.
Scholarly ambition encounters unforgiving factuality in this previously untranslated 1966 novel from the Dutch author (1921–95) whose edgy experimental fiction includes The Tears of the Acacias and The Dark Room of Damocles.
Narrator Alfred Issendorf is a 25-year-old geology student who joins a scientific expedition to northern Norway (Finnmark), afire with dreams of establishing his reputation, ideally by discovering “a mineral that would be named after me: Issendorfite.” Alfred’s determination to prove his professor and mentor’s thesis—that craters found in the earth of the remote area just north of Lapland were caused by fallen meteors—quickly founders. Contacts lack vital information; promised aerial photographs never materialize; Alfred’s watch and compass malfunction; and mosquitoes plague his every step. Hermans deftly connects Alfred’s hunger for success with memories of his tense relationship with his mother (a renowned literary critic who doesn’t actually read the books she writes about—take that, reviewers!) and inchoate memories of his father, a botanist who died from a fall into a mountain crevasse when his son was seven. The narrative of Alfred’s ordeal—which is beautifully detailed and consummately suspenseful—is also nicely varied by episodic scenes among the protagonist and his three Norwegian fellow travelers: easygoing Arne, unimaginative plodder Mikkelsen and effusive autodidact Qvigstad, a fount of eccentric information who never stops talking. And Alfred’s habit of measuring himself against storied heroes of exploration and discovery provides a firm layer of irony—marred intermittently by numerous reiterations of his gathering fear that “I will have achieved nothing. I will have survived, that’s all.” Such fatalism is both confirmed and tempered by the lucid conclusion, in which a “gift from heaven” decisively completes his journey.
An unusual and intriguing book, and a welcome introduction to the work of a neglected 20th-century master.Pub Date: May 10, 2007
ISBN: 1-58567-583-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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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