A high-concept pastiche: part thriller, part romance, part parable, part darkest-Africa adventure. If it doesn’t quite have...
A ghostwriter’s ghostwriter hires on to save a man from hanging in this sly import first published in Spain in 2005.
Tommy Thompson is a young English writer desperate to be published. He’ll do anything and write anything to make that happen. Through a Faustian portal enters Frank Strub, a ghostwriter’s ghostwriter who proposes that Tommy become ghostwriter to a ghostwriter to…and so it goes. Atop this ghostly totem pole perches that prince of pulp Luther Flag, whose name on a book cover in the England of 1914 has Oprah-like potency, and whose current bestseller, Pandora in the Congo, turns out to be talismanic for Tommy. It leads him to Edward Norton, the barrister charged with representing the sorely beset Marcus Garvey, who’s about to be tried for the double homicide of the aristocratic Craver brothers, mindless Richard and cunning William. The smart money heavily favors the noose. So hard-pressed is Norton for a defense that he conceives the bizarre notion of novelizing his case by hiring Tommy to ghostwrite the Marcus Garvey story, making it sympathetic, making it heartbreaking, making it clear that homicide is as inimical to Garvey as it would be to, say, the saintly hero of Pandora. Tommy enlists in the cause, but as he labors an unforeseen and certainly unbecoming alchemy takes place: He finds that he’s writing a love story. More problematically, he discovers that he’s telling the story of his own love for Garvey’s heroine.
A high-concept pastiche: part thriller, part romance, part parable, part darkest-Africa adventure. If it doesn’t quite have the pop of Piñol’s debut (Cold Skin, 2005), that’s probably because it’s more than twice as long.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84767-187-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2009
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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