A European historical footnote becomes a contemporary morality tale and a small, touching act of homage.
In a tragicomic parable of justice based on a true episode, the corrupt 17th-century power brokers of Sicily meet their match in a canny, revenge-driven female viceroy.
Setting aside his popular Inspector Montalbano crime series, Camilleri (A Voice in the Night, 2016, etc.) offers a curiosity, fleshing out the brief episode in 1677 when a Spanish noblewoman filled in her for her dead husband as ruler of a patriarchal Italian island. Angelic of face, form, and voice, 25-year-old Donna Eleonora made no public appearances during her husband Don Angel’s two-year reign as Viceroy of Sicily on behalf of the King of Spain. But Don Angel, who arrived without an ounce of fat on him, mysteriously swelled to 400 pounds and expired suddenly during a Holy Royal Council session. His self-serving six-man council takes advantage of the sudden death to pass all manner of questionable measures, little expecting that the viceroy’s successor would expose their treachery. But they reckon without Donna Eleonora, who inherits Don Angel’s mantle and brings strategic brilliance and an unerring moral compass to the job. Replacing the council and overcoming an attempted coup led by the villainous archbishop of Palermo, she benefits the populace by halving the price of bread and setting up shelters for endangered women. Camilleri laces this true tale of exemplary leadership with humor that is sometimes farcical and slapstick, often simply wry. But underneath the geniality lies an all-too-plausible chronicle of entrenched financial misappropriation and sexual abuse, and while Donna Eleonora avenges her husband by punishing all who offended him, she is brought down by a religious edict that insists only a man can serve as viceroy. Thus ends her 27-day reign and a novel which lightly but elegantly revives an obscure historical moment.
A European historical footnote becomes a contemporary morality tale and a small, touching act of homage.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60945-391-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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