A new perspective on an old war. Gripping, thoughtful, heartbreaking, and, above all, human.
Members of a wealthy British family with German roots meet with prejudice and hardship as World War I cuts its terrible swath through Europe.
In Williams’ (Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte, 2014, etc.) epic novel, the first of a planned trilogy, the de Witt family is living patriarch Rudolf’s dream of British aristocracy: country estate, numerous servants, educated sons, and a daughter betrothed to a nearby lord. Despite his successful meat business, however, Rudolf is very much an outsider, having been born in Germany, and as the country declares war in 1914, British citizens of German descent are treated as spies and enemies. Rudolf is imprisoned, and his wife, Verena, struggles to maintain normalcy on the estate as servants, rations, and money disappear. Their children respond to wartime in different ways: selfish Arthur remains in Paris; sensitive Michael joins the army with Tom, one of the servants; Emmeline elopes with a dissenter; and Celia, the youngest, finds herself trapped in the empty estate with her depressed mother until she runs away and becomes an ambulance driver in France. Of course, the horrors of the war change each of them irreparably. The novel is quietly impressive. Early on, it echoes of classic novels (Atonement, Brideshead Revisited), and the story seems almost too familiar, but as the narrative develops and the characters deepen, it’s hard to put down. Celia is the center of the narrative, and her developing self-awareness as she evolves from pampered young debutante to war volunteer forces the reader to imagine not only the family torn apart, not only the country splintered, but the individual souls, young and old, male and female, traumatized by “the war to end all wars.”
A new perspective on an old war. Gripping, thoughtful, heartbreaking, and, above all, human.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-867-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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