To quote Kracht: “quite literary but somewhat awkward.”
Swiss writer Kracht’s bestselling, experimental 2012 novel—based on the life of a real person—gets translated into English.
Sick of civilization, August Engelhardt seeks a different kind of living. In the early 20th century, he purchases a coconut-rich Pacific island called Kabakon and, there, hopes to start a colony based on vegetarianism and the healing powers of the sun and coconuts. But Engelhardt is also a nudist, and this doesn’t appeal so much to certain people (“no reason to lie naked on a beach,” one potential partner tells him) and appeals a little too much to others. Nevertheless, Engelhardt—sometimes mad, sometimes misguided, sometimes prophetic—forms bonds with several of the island's natives and finds a bit of peace…until a famous musician named Lützow arrives and becomes an acolyte and, perhaps, a usurper, showing Engelhardt that not all attention is good. In this slim novel, Kracht uses the general outline of Engelhardt’s life to cram a lot into a small space; the omniscient narrator, in language both formal (“Now that we have endeavored to tell of our poor friend’s past”) and informal (“to cut a long story short”), tells not only Engelhardt’s story, but also the story of the birth of 20th-century science and demagoguery, touching on the world outside Engelhardt and including references to Einstein and Hitler. But what is one to make of this book ultimately? The language, florid and overstuffed with adverbs, harkens back to, and maybe parodies, an earlier style of writing, but to what end? The narrator jumps around in time, gets sidetracked, and sometimes seems barely interested in Engelhardt. “To wit: modernity had dawned; poets suddenly wrote fragmented lines,” Kracht writes. Does this account for the novel’s trapdoor style? Perhaps—and some of Kracht’s doors are more fun to fall into than others.
To quote Kracht: “quite literary but somewhat awkward.”Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-17524-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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