At times ruefully hilarious and absurd, this slight, philosophical book will humor anyone who’s ever questioned his or her...
In German Book Prize winner Ruge’s (In Times of Fading Light, 2013) new novel, a writer abandons his life in Berlin and embarks on a journey toward self-realization.
In the wake of his mother’s death and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ruge’s unnamed narrator finds himself deeply discontent with the mind-numbing monotony of his life. He’s 40, exists generally in solitude, and can’t seem to cut ties with his ex-girlfriend Karolin, whom he dated for 10 years. After being cajoled into watching Karolin’s daughter (whose father, ostensibly, is not him) on New Year’s Eve, our narrator decides it’s time to leave Berlin and finally start that novel he’s been meaning to write. The next morning, “like a man venturing into the street for the first time after a long sickness,” he departs to Barcelona and, from there, takes an overnight bus to the titular Cabo de Gata, a village on the southeast coast of Andalusia (a word which he, heretofore, always thought fondly of as “A kind of fantastic adjective meaning wonderful or enchanting”). Suffice it to say, it’s no paradise. To his dismay, he’s dropped off in a ghost town complete with shoddy architecture, a few vacant bars, and a promenade overrun by gangs of cats and dogs. But after a few peculiar encounters on the beach—involving a deceased hermit crab and a flock of synchronized birds hunting for food—he decides to stay for more than just one night and eventually acquiesces to the simpler lifestyle of Cabo de Gata. And the fact that he’s largely ignored by the locals only makes him more emboldened by his anonymity. The tone of the novel shifts and gradually becomes darker when our narrator meets an elusive ginger tabby cat that takes to him and also eerily reminds him of his mother. With colloquial prose and sardonic wit, Ruge eruditely captures his narrator’s precarious reality and creates a world that’s a pleasure to observe and meander through.
At times ruefully hilarious and absurd, this slight, philosophical book will humor anyone who’s ever questioned his or her place in this unforgiving universe.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 9781555977573
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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