Konar approaches a difficult subject with artistic ambition.
A literary exploration of Nazi experiments.
Stasha and Pearl are 12 years old when they arrive at Auschwitz. The fact that they are 12 is insignificant to their captors; the fact that they are twins is not. Exceptional by virtue of their birth, they will join other children like themselves as special subjects for Josef Mengele. It’s under his regime that Stasha and Pearl, two halves of the same whole, are transformed into distinct individuals. And it’s at a death-camp concert—just one manifestation of Mengele’s perversity—that Pearl disappears. After her liberation, Stasha struggles through the ruins of the world she once knew, searching for her missing half and hungering for revenge against the monster who ruled Auschwitz. It’s not easy to critique a Holocaust novel. Even if the author didn’t thank particular survivors in her acknowledgements—and she does—it’s difficult to escape the sense that any complaint about form or technique might be read as disparagement of the project of remembering. Certainly, Konar’s fiction draws the reader’s attention to a gruesome paradox: the veneer of science only makes Nazi atrocities more horrifying, just as the meticulous medical attention and occasional kindness Mengele offered his subjects only damn him as a monster. Konar’s fiction also draws the reader’s attention to Konar’s style as a writer. The synopsis at the beginning of this review is accurate, but it’s deceptive if it suggests that plot—or forward momentum of any kind—is an important element of the book. When it comes to craft, Konar is clearly most interested in language, in metaphor and invention. Surely, there are readers who will appreciate this. Some, though, might find that the poetry puts too much distance between the reader and the reality of Auschwitz.
Konar approaches a difficult subject with artistic ambition.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-30810-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
PROFILES
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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