As the Russian-born French author’s dual literary citizenship suggests, he may really be both his generation’s Chekhov and...
The attempt to record the star-crossed story of two lovers who meet on a WWII battlefield makes up Makine’s limpid eighth novel (following A Hero’s Daughter, 2003, etc.).
An unnamed narrator initially describes his own experiences growing up in a dilapidated Russian orphanage in the 1960s, when Nikita Khrushchev has been officially denounced and the narrator and his comrades ape their elders’ revisions of history by contriving “heroic myths” featuring their unknown fathers. The narrator is befriended by a French nurse who has spent many years in Russia and, from the nurse’s piecemeal fragments of memory, learns the history of the eponymous Jacques Dorme, a French fighter pilot who was captured and interred in a makeshift German POW camp, whence he escaped, made his way eastward, and joined a Russian bomber squadron—and briefly encountered the nurse (renamed Alexandra), to whom their “single week [together] had been a long life of love.” In the final section, the narrator travels to the village where Dorme grew up and confides to the pilot’s sole survivor his own conflicted wish to reshape as a novel his homage to lives destroyed by war, in an effort to assert and perhaps finally fully understand “their deep connection to what I am.” Makine handles this moving story’s tricky time shifts expertly, and—except for a handful too many romantic wartime clichés—creates satisfyingly complex images of a lonely boy dreaming his way into a fuller reality, a stranger in strange lands seeking comfort through human connection, and a courageous woman who knows exactly how much happiness she dares to expect. And nobody surpasses Makine as a maker of stunning visuals—such as the recurring memory of a snapped necklace, beads cascading onto a floor—which subtly underscore his narrative’s plangent romantic momentum.
As the Russian-born French author’s dual literary citizenship suggests, he may really be both his generation’s Chekhov and its Proust.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-739-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.
Here, Follett sets the thrillers aside for a long, steady story about building a cathedral in 12th-century England.
Bloodthirsty or adventure-crazed Follett readers will be frustrated, but anyone who has ever been moved by the splendors of a fine church will sink right into this highly detailed but fast-moving historical work—a novel about the people and skills needed to put up an eye-popping cathedral in the very unsettled days just before the ascension of Henry II. The cathedral is the brainchild of Philip, prior of the monastery at Kingsbridge, and Tom, an itinerant master mason. Philip, shrewd and ambitious but genuinely devout, sees it as a sign of divine agreement when his decrepit old cathedral burns on the night that Tom and his starving family show up seeking shelter. Actually, it's Tom's clever stepson Jack who has stepped in to carry out God's will by secretly torching the cathedral attic, but the effect is the same. Tom gets the commission to start the rebuilding—which is what he has wanted to do more than anything in his life. Meanwhile, however, the work is complicated greatly by local politics. There is a loathsome baron and his family who have usurped the local earldom and allied themselves with the powerful, cynical bishop—who is himself sinfully jealous of Philip's cathedral. There are the dispossessed heirs to earldom, a beautiful girl and her bellicose brother, both sworn to root out the usurpers. And there is the mysterious Ellen, Tom's second wife, who witnessed an ancient treachery that haunts the bishop, the priory, and the vile would-be earl. The great work is set back, and Tom is killed in a raid by the rivals. It falls to young Jack to finish the work. Thriller writing turns out to be pretty good training, since Follett's history moves like a fast freight train. Details are plenty, but they support rather than smother.
It's all quite entertaining and memorable.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1989
ISBN: 0451225244
Page Count: 973
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1989
BOOK TO SCREEN
Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.
Ng's nuanced debut novel begins with the death of a teenage girl and then uses the mysterious circumstances of her drowning as a springboard to dive into the troubled waters beneath the calm surface of her Chinese-American family.
When 16-year-old Lydia Lee fails to show up at breakfast one spring morning in 1977, and her body is later dragged from the lake in the Ohio college town where she and her biracial family don't quite fit in, her parents—blonde homemaker Marilyn and Chinese-American history professor James—older brother and younger sister get swept into the churning emotional conflicts and currents they've long sought to evade. What, or who, compelled Lydia—a promising student who could often be heard chatting happily on the phone; was doted on by her parents; and enjoyed an especially close relationship with her Harvard-bound brother, Nath—to slip away from home and venture out in a rowboat late at night when she had always been deathly afraid of water, refusing to learn to swim? The surprising answers lie deep beneath the surface, and Ng, whose stories have won awards including the Pushcart Prize, keeps an admirable grip on the narrative's many strands as she expertly explores and exposes the Lee family's secrets: the dreams that have given way to disappointment; the unspoken insecurities, betrayals and yearnings; the myriad ways the Lees have failed to understand one another and, perhaps, themselves. These long-hidden, quietly explosive truths, weighted by issues of race and gender, slowly bubble to the surface of Ng's sensitive, absorbing novel and reverberate long after its final page.
Ng's emotionally complex debut novel sucks you in like a strong current and holds you fast until its final secrets surface.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-571-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
