With echoes of Mordecai Richler’s antiheroic tales of urban Jewish life, Unger's downbeat exploration suggests that though...
Despairing debut about the Jewish experience in 20th-century Central America that, though enlivened by innocent eroticism and comic absurdity, finds little to love in a sunny fool’s paradise.
At 53, Marcos Eltaleph has it made: a member of one of 1980s Guatemala’s wealthiest Jewish dynasties, he has so far avoided marriage, responsibility, serious illness, embarrassing business failures, or mediocre success. His brothers, especially Aaron, have become big men in the Jewish community, heading a business empire based on retail, paper products, and import-export. They have luxurious houses, their kids attend US schools, and Eltaleph weddings and bar mitzvahs are social events. Whenever the family brushes up against power-mad colonels or corrupt politicians, they seem to be spared the Nazi torments their father escaped by fleeing Hitler’s Germany. So, instead of disappearing into a dank jail when Aaron doesn’t pay a bribe, Marcos finds himself imprisoned in a hospital, where his attempt to enjoy the sexual favors of a nurse are interrupted by his girlfriend Esperanza, a sexy Colombian half his age whom he met on a cruise ship and is afraid to marry. Mysteriously sprung from his hospital, Marcos eventually proposes to Esperanza, who wants nothing but her own nightclub—but Marcos is suspicious of Rafael Mendoza, a “retired” colonel who offers to rent the couple his own failed nightclub. Suddenly the Etaleph family department store is bombed. Are Communist rebels to blame, or did Aaron fail to pay off the right people? As Aaron assures his brother that Jews really can make a homeland in paradise, Marcos learns that, as a Jew, he must count his blessing before they turn sour.
With echoes of Mordecai Richler’s antiheroic tales of urban Jewish life, Unger's downbeat exploration suggests that though success at the price of collaboration with evil is no success, when you meet the love of your life, you might as well live.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8156-0737-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Syracuse Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
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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