High-flying but somehow unpretentious prose, intellectual fireworks, and more steamy couplings than a shelf’s worth of...
Essayist, deadpan NPR racounteur, and too-infrequent novelist Codrescu (The Blood Countess, 1995, etc.) offers a comedic take on the life of Casanova.
It’s all very well being a legendary ladies’ man, heralded all across Europe and doubtless on other continents as well for acts of shocking bravery in the pursuit of sexual conquests, but what happens when one such as Casanova grows old? Here we find the Chevalier de Seingalt ensconced in a remote Bohemian castle by the grace of his sponsor, Count Waldstein, who has retained Casanova to catalogue his immense library. Giving a mere fraction of his time to the Count’s task, our hero is much more interested in getting on with his own writing and in telling stories. Fortunately for him, serving girl Laura Brock is fascinated by his tales and soon willing to take part in sexual escapades with other servant girls for his observation and enjoyment. As fully packed as the story is with tales of Casanova’s historic trysts—including rendezvous with Venetian convent girls and the seduction of a 300-woman harem—it makes a point of illustrating just how exaggerated the Chevalier’s already-impressive exploits had become even in his own lifetime. The plot is not much more than a thin rigging upon which Codrescu can hoist a multitude of erotic flashbacks, stories-within-stories, and commentaries on religion, philosophy, sex, and the changing tides of history in 18th-century Europe. While the author is obviously enamored of his subject, Codrescu never tries to make Casanova out to be more than he is (unlike, for example, Doug Wright’s worshipful treatment of the Marquis de Sade in the play Quills). Though the narrative never turns a blind eye to the casual violence of its day, this is ultimately a fun and sexy romp through a libertine’s freely fictionalized life. Consider it the bastard child of Anne Rice’s erotica and Umberto Eco’s philosophical meta-fiction.
High-flying but somehow unpretentious prose, intellectual fireworks, and more steamy couplings than a shelf’s worth of romance novels: altogether, a potent dose of high-literary eroticism.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86800-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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