Donoghue, a Briton, is readable and well-intentioned, but plausibility frays in the number of bad guys converted to goodness...
This first novel ambitiously and awkwardly examines questions of guilt and forgiveness arising from the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.
At a 1962 chess tournament in Amsterdam, Holocaust survivor Emil Clément is disturbed that his first opponent is the German Wilhelm Schweninger, a Nazi propagandist. His emotions and memories are jolted further when he is sought out in the Dutch city by Paul Meissner, an officer at Auschwitz who helped Clément and, after jail time for war crimes, became a priest. Chapters alternate between the strange bonds formed amid the horrors of imprisonment and the slowly growing friendship among the three men in 1962. To boost officers’ morale at Auschwitz, Meissner starts a chess club, but when he learns that the Jewish prisoner Clément is considered unbeatable, he arranges to have him face the camp’s best German players. After Clément defeats three, he is hounded by a Gestapo sadist who is also a top chess player. Schweninger has a minor role in the flashbacks: Germany’s best player in the 1940s, he was to have been the prisoner’s last opponent but was prevented from playing the game. In the 1962 chapters, Meissner is a Catholic bishop dying of leukemia who wants Clément to find forgiveness and to abandon his belief that there are no good Germans. The novel’s dubious setup, with Meissner so quickly corralling Clément and Schweninger, is offset by a fairly persuasive rendering of the camp, where the author uses the chess games to maintain an element of suspense in a situation in which death was almost inevitable—and clearly was postponed for Clément.
Donoghue, a Briton, is readable and well-intentioned, but plausibility frays in the number of bad guys converted to goodness and, unfortunately, in the notion that the bitterness Clément has harbored for almost two decades can be eased in several days of recollection and dying-man homilies. That’s quite a talking cure.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-13570-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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