Sexual passions are secondary to far more fiery political ones in Tharoor’s truthful but disappointing third novel, more a...
Tharoor (Show Business, 1992, etc.) makes an anguished plea for religious tolerance, in a story about the 1989 murder of a young American during a sectarian riot in northern India.
The New York–based author, an official at the United Nations, is impressively knowledgeable and perceptive about the subcontinent’s history and current ills, including increasing intolerance of religious diversity. And the story he tells graphically illustrates incendiary tensions between Hindus and Muslims. But the investigation into the brutal murder of blond, blue-eyed doctoral student Priscilla Hart is schematic and rife with foreshadowing. Newspaper clippings, interviews with officials, letters, and individuals’ recollections offer relevant commentary and suggestive clues as Priscilla’s divorced parents, Rudyard and Katherine Hart, do some sleuthing and recollect their past. The marriage broke down while the family was living in India, as Coca-Cola executive Rudyard fought to retain the beverage’s market share on the subcontinent and 15-year-old Priscilla came home to find Dad in bed with his secretary. Idealistic Priscilla returned to India in her early 20s to research her dissertation and work at an American-run population-control center in Zaligarh. In that small town, she met and fell in love with handsome Lakshman, a district magistrate who wrote poetry on the side. He was married and a father, but soon he was meeting Priscilla to make love at an old ruin. The investigation also reveals that Priscilla made enemies as she tried to help the town’s abused women. Realizing he couldn’t leave his wife, Lakshman had arranged to meet Priscilla one last time before the riot, which broke out when a militant Hindu group provoked the local Muslims. The ensuing mayhem gave license to kill and avenge as a truth long intimated was revealed.
Sexual passions are secondary to far more fiery political ones in Tharoor’s truthful but disappointing third novel, more a reasoned argument than a tender love story.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-605-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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