Ulitskaya brilliantly evokes these resilient characters, showing us the Russian soul as transformed throughout its...
A masterly novella and six stories portray the depths of the Russian character, in a third English-language appearance by this geneticist-turned-novelist (Medea and Her Children, 2002, etc.).
The Moscow-based Ulitskaya has intimate access to characters in vastly different stations of Russian society. With the same bracing élan, she describes the most elevated, aged aristocrat (like the supremely supercilious grandmother Mour, in the story “Queen of Spades,” who speaks only of the famous men she has bedded while scorning her own family, and the lowly seamstress Sonechka, for whom the love of husband and daughter offers a reprieve from her peasant mediocrity. The mean-spirited crone Mour still orders her daughter, Anna, around, correcting the record of her fabulous life with famous lovers, always demanding something “elusive and indefinable” while her daughter, a doctor and grandmother herself, palliates and humors her mother’s latest caprice. Anna’s prosperous ex-husband arrives from South Africa, bringing unheard-of riches and turning the Moscow apartment upside down, yet the mother-daughter dynamic remains fatally rooted in place. The title novella’s Sonechka, on the other hand, is lifted from her dutiful work in the library—where she experiences a kind of religious ecstasy in reading Russian literature—by marriage to an older revolutionary artist, exiled in Paris but now returned to Soviet Russia to scrounge work designing theater sets. Despite the unimaginable cold and hunger the family must endure, Sonechka is happy in love; even when her elderly husband takes up with the canny Polish girl Jasia, and finds new life painting her, Sonechka acts nobly, shining with “a quiet joy of literary perfection.” In “Zurich,” Ulitskaya yanks her reader into the brutal exigencies of modern-day Russian economics as 30-year-old Lida, highly educated, enterprising and desperate to find a way out of her no-end poverty, strategically courts a Swiss businessman, vanquishes him and triumphs as the prosperous owner of a Zurich restaurant.
Ulitskaya brilliantly evokes these resilient characters, showing us the Russian soul as transformed throughout its complicated history.Pub Date: May 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-8052-4195-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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