One of the finest novels ever written about war and its aftermath, and well worth the 23-year wait.
Hazzard painstakingly constructs a compact panorama of a world ravaged by war, in her expert fourth novel—and first since the NBCC Award winner, The Transit of Venus (1980).
The story opens in 1947 when Major Aldred Leith, a 32-year-old combat veteran and prison camp survivor, travels to a military compound on an island in Japan’s Inland Sea, preparatory to a “tour” of Hiroshima, one of several sites he’s compelled to write about, and understand. Housed with the family of an intemperate Brigadier, Aldred finds himself drawn to the latter’s adolescent children: beautiful, reserved Helen, and her almost ethereal brother Benedict, who is wasting away from a pernicious paralytic disease. Hazzard very gradually layers in revealing details of Aldred’s family background (as the basically unloved son of a successful romance novelist), complicated sexual and marital history, and increasingly disillusioning military experiences. And, in dexterously handled parallel narratives, she traces the fortunes of other deracinated and stricken people (“Everyone has a cruel story”): notably, Aldred’s Australian soldier friend Peter Exley, assigned to Hong Kong to investigate allegations of Japanese war crimes. The irony of “conquest” is expressed with matchless clarity and grace, as military idealism reaps what it has sown, Aldred stoically bears scars inflicted by “the great fire into which his times had pitched him,” things fall clamorously apart, and several “heroes” and “rescuers” recognize the bitter truth of the “Chinese maxim whereby one becomes responsible for the life one saves.” And all this is communicated in a chiseled prose that makes the pages shimmer, many shaped with the concentrated intensity of poetry. Except for a very slightly improbable ending, this almost indescribably rich story (which will remind many of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient) moves from strength to strength, and no reader will be unmoved by its sorrowing, soaring eloquence.
One of the finest novels ever written about war and its aftermath, and well worth the 23-year wait.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-16644-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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