It's unsurprising that Singer's new novel, originally published in Yiddish (Der Baal-Tshuve) in 1974, was not quickly offered in English translation: this is the Nobel winner's thinnest, most didactic fiction by far, with strident views (not expressed by IBS directly, it's true) that might warm the hearts of Jerry Falwell & Co. as well as those of Jews opposed to assimilation. The narrator, telling his story to Singer in 1969 Jerusalem, is rabbis' descendant Joseph Shapiro—a Holocaust survivor (he fled from Poland to Russia) who rediscovers his childhood sweetheart, emigrates with her to postwar America, makes big money in real estate, takes an obligatory mistress. . . and is thoroughly disgusted: "I lay deep in the mire and did the devil's work." On the other hand, he doesn't have enough faith to choose religion over Sodom: "I hated the modern world and everything it represented. . . but I had no proof whatsoever that the Torah had been given by God or that there even was a God." Still, faith or no faith, after discovering the infidelities of both wife and mistress, Shapiro renounces his uptown N.Y. life, becomes a Singeresque vegetarian on the spot, wanders into a Lower East Side shul to rediscover the old Jewishness ("the so-called new Jewishness was actually the same as worldliness"), and hears a voice telling him to flee Satan's New York and go to Israel. ("Flee from women who live like whores and demand to be loved and honored.") True, there are stumbling-blocks along the way: a brief surrender to the "Evil Spirit" in the form of a sluttish woman; disillusionment about over-worldly Israel. ("It's just one step from assimilation to conversion, and sometimes no more than a generation or two from conversion to Nazism.") But soon Shapiro leaves Tel Aviv for Jerusalem—joining a study house, becoming a "Talmud Jew," shunning all specks of secular humanism ("The slightest compromise that you make with the culture of the Gentiles and Jewish pagans is a gesture toward evil"), taking a virtuous new wife. . . and finding faith: "Long before you feel a total faith, you must act in a Jewish way. Jewishness leads to faith." Is Shapiro, then, a stand-in for Singer—Not entirely, presumably—since Singer remains in Manhattan with the pagans. But there's no suggestion of skepticism or disagreement here, making it difficult not to read Shapiro's born-again-Jewish opinions—which include wholesale put-downs of Tolstoy, Homer, psychoanalysis, and other worldliness—as the author's. And, though Singer's storytelling genius isn't totally absent from this slight, linear tale, it's primarily for students of his work-and-thought—while much of his usual readership will find it merely puzzling or off-putting.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1983
ISBN: 0374531536
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983
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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