Who knows why this stuff is so deeply satisfying? But it most surely is.
An Italian journalist joins forces with fellow expatriates in Paris to subvert the Fascist government at home, while he sinks into love with a German aristocrat.
At ease again in the time and territory he has carved out for himself in such fine fashion, Furst (Dark Voyage, 2004; Blood of Victory, 2002) sets the stage here with a murder. The dapper, aging editor of Liberazione, a subversive newspaper published by anti-Mussolini intellectuals in France, is executed by a Fascist hit team while in the arms of his mistress. His job goes to Carlo Weisz, a half-German scribbler from Trieste who, like his colleagues, has fled for his life from the thugs who stole Italy in 1922. Weisz is, like all great Furst heroes, at first view anything but heroic. Fortyish and a loner, the Reuters reporter, newly returned from covering the Spanish Civil War, lives in seedy digs, dallying with a lovely Parisian he does not love, dining alone in neighborhood bistros, observing the coming catastrophe. The little newspaper to which he donates his time is his one effort to stick it to the criminals in power in Rome. Smuggled into Italy by a network of resistance workers, Liberazione is printed in Genoa under the noses of the authorities and distributed throughout the country by high-school girls. It is enough of an annoyance to the fascisti that the lives of all contributors are at risk, and Weisz, as editor, is first now on the hit list of OVRA, the nasty Italian organization hunting enemies of the state. He’s also watched by interested British intelligence teams. An assignment to report events in Berlin reunites Weisz with old love Christa von Schirren, now married to a Prussian aristocrat. Christa is also involved with resistance efforts, perhaps even more dangerously than Weisz. As the great dark forces of the age close in on the couple, Weisz finds it necessary to strike a deal with those slippery Brits.
Who knows why this stuff is so deeply satisfying? But it most surely is.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6019-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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