Who knows why this stuff is so deeply satisfying? But it most surely is.
An Italian journalist joins forces with fellow expatriates in Paris to subvert the Fascist government at home, while he sinks into love with a German aristocrat.
At ease again in the time and territory he has carved out for himself in such fine fashion, Furst (Dark Voyage, 2004; Blood of Victory, 2002) sets the stage here with a murder. The dapper, aging editor of Liberazione, a subversive newspaper published by anti-Mussolini intellectuals in France, is executed by a Fascist hit team while in the arms of his mistress. His job goes to Carlo Weisz, a half-German scribbler from Trieste who, like his colleagues, has fled for his life from the thugs who stole Italy in 1922. Weisz is, like all great Furst heroes, at first view anything but heroic. Fortyish and a loner, the Reuters reporter, newly returned from covering the Spanish Civil War, lives in seedy digs, dallying with a lovely Parisian he does not love, dining alone in neighborhood bistros, observing the coming catastrophe. The little newspaper to which he donates his time is his one effort to stick it to the criminals in power in Rome. Smuggled into Italy by a network of resistance workers, Liberazione is printed in Genoa under the noses of the authorities and distributed throughout the country by high-school girls. It is enough of an annoyance to the fascisti that the lives of all contributors are at risk, and Weisz, as editor, is first now on the hit list of OVRA, the nasty Italian organization hunting enemies of the state. He’s also watched by interested British intelligence teams. An assignment to report events in Berlin reunites Weisz with old love Christa von Schirren, now married to a Prussian aristocrat. Christa is also involved with resistance efforts, perhaps even more dangerously than Weisz. As the great dark forces of the age close in on the couple, Weisz finds it necessary to strike a deal with those slippery Brits.
Who knows why this stuff is so deeply satisfying? But it most surely is.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6019-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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