One of the world’s great writers continues his steady march toward a Nobel Prize.
An “explanation” for the evil committed by Adolf Hitler is the quarry of this searching, somewhat discursive new (2001) novel from the internationally acclaimed Dutch author.
The obviously partially autobiographical protagonist is Rudolf Herter, a prominent Dutch novelist who at the story’s outset arrives in Vienna to give a public reading at the National Library and a lengthy television interview. Herter is thereafter contacted by Ulrich and Julia Falk, an elderly Austrian couple, who have heard the author speculate to his TV interviewer that the enigma of Hitler might be approached by making the dictator a character in a fictional “fantasy” not specifically related to the Fuhrer’s own history. The Falks have a real story to tell: that they worked for Hitler at his Bavarian retreat Berchtesgaden and were commanded to raise as their own son the eponymous child of Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun. Mulisch (The Procedure, 2001, etc.) handles this explosive premise with great skill, moving artfully from the Falkses’ hesitant, guilty disclosures to the unraveling of Herter’s certainties about his own rationality. The suggestion of a soulless “black hole” impervious to comprehension grinds painfully against the novelist’s impulse to tame and order chaotic human behavior, in a synthesis of ideas not notably inferior to that presented in Mulisch’s unruly 1996 masterpiece, The Discovery of Heaven (alluded to slyly here as Herter’s major work, The Invention of Love). Suspense is maintained even when the tale grows meditative or talky, and Mulisch plays expertly with readers’ expectations in its final sequence, which presents revealing excerpts from a diary of Eva Braun’s that is perhaps authentic, perhaps Rudolf Herter’s crowning, compromising “invention.” Few if any other living novelists could make such potentially intractable material so thrillingly dramatic and provocative.
One of the world’s great writers continues his steady march toward a Nobel Prize.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-670-03253-0
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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