A welcome rediscovery and a book that would make Gogol guffaw.
A forgotten classic of early Soviet literature—forgotten for reasons political and not literary.
Zoshchenko was a “fellow traveler” of Lenin and company, but, as Pasternak wrote of Zhivago, one of those kinds who supported the regime for reasons too subtle to make him reliable. “I have no hatred for anyone,” he declared in 1922. “In general thrust, I’m closest to the Bolsheviks. And I’m willing to bolshevize around with them.” That’s just the kind of talk to get a writer of the Soviet era in trouble, though it took the authorities a quarter-century to get around to expelling Zoshchenko from the writers union. In the meantime, he wrote, including this slender collection of stories set out in the dusty, reactionary countryside, where the church still held sway and people still believed in things like love. Oh, transgressions occur there, to be sure: There are the usual vices, the usual scheming of married men to woo innocent maidens, that sort of thing. But mostly people are trying to figure out how to love according to the ideals of the new Soviet man and woman, and that’s not so easy: A teacher of calligraphy is dismissed from his post after “the subject was stricken from the curriculum,” and a music teacher who specializes in the triangle worries that he’s next: “If they take that away from me, how would I live? What, besides the triangle, can I hold onto?” Throughout, Zoshchenko, breaking the fourth wall, comments on the various inadequacies that keep him from writing as well as he can about such matters and such people: “The tale’s hero,” he writes of one piece, “is trifling and unimportant, perhaps unworthy of the attention of today’s pampered public.” That may be all the more so today, but a century later, Zoshchenko is a writer worth knowing.
A welcome rediscovery and a book that would make Gogol guffaw.Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-231-18378-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
