Despite its flaws, George’s Proustian homage to a lost time will be a Francophile’s madeleine.
Set in 1927, George’s atmospheric third novel follows the lives of four ordinary Parisians, each seeking something they lost, over the course of a summer day.
The book opens a few hours after midnight as Souren Balakian, an Armenian refugee haunted by traumatic memories of his flight from Ottoman Anatolia a decade before, prepares his puppets for his daily shows at the Jardin du Luxembourg. Impoverished painter Guillaume Blanc awakes, hungover and desperate to raise money to pay off a loan shark’s debt that is due that day. Insomniac Jean-Paul Maillard, a journalist nursing physical and emotional wounds from the Great War, comforts himself listening to the music of George Gershwin. Camille Clermont arrives at a cemetery with her young daughter, Marie, to lay flowers on the grave of her former employer, writer Marcel Proust. As the day progresses, alternating chapters interweave these characters’ pasts with their presents to gradually reveal tragedies and heart-wrenching secrets. The era’s celebrities (Josephine Baker, Gertrude Stein, Maurice Ravel, Sylvia Beach, Ernest and Pauline Hemingway) make guest appearances in a name-dropping Midnight in Paris fashion. Despite some striking moments (a badly wounded Jean-Paul is moved by an impromptu piano concert in an abandoned church by an ambulance driver who turns out to be Ravel), other encounters feel forced. Likewise, in George’s aim to get his four protagonists to the climax in a Montmartre jazz club, the loose connections he creates among them seem at times like heavy-handed contrivances. And despite the vividness of the stories being told, their power is undermined by the flatness of the character development. Still, the ambiguous ending will provide discussion fodder for reading groups.
Despite its flaws, George’s Proustian homage to a lost time will be a Francophile’s madeleine.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-30718-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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