Hews too close to stereotype. Not bad, but mildly disappointing.
From the author of The Spanish Bow (2007), a somewhat less successful sophomore outing.
The task of 26-year-old Ernst Vogler, a minor functionary for the Third Reich's Special Projects division, looks straightforward enough. He's to travel to Rome and oversee the packing of the classical statue The Discus Thrower, recently purchased on the express instructions of Hitler, the former art student known to his underlings as Der Kunstsammler. Then Vogler is to accompany Italian twins Enzo and Cosimo as they transport the statue to the border, where it will be handed over to the Gestapo, and he will get back to the safety of his desk. But things go immediately awry. Vogler, a callow young art expert who favors the "deep, clean, and relatively painless cut of narrow knowledge" to the messiness of politics or larger cultural issues—and who has been tapped for this plum job in part because he appeared, by sheer accident, to have expressed public contempt for a black American athlete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics—finds that he lacks the needed linguistic and cultural skills to navigate languid, un-orderly, sentimental Italy. To avoid a threatened theft or double-cross, his drivers take to rustic side roads, a tactic that slows the pace and jeopardizes Vogler's deadline. Then it becomes apparent that the brothers have higher priorities than the job at hand: romances, marriage proposals, rivalries, a perilous entanglement with criminals. After a series of escalating misadventures, Vogler finds himself marooned in an Italian pastoral family life that may be dolce around the edges, but that is also extremely dangerous. Along the way, though, he surrenders himself both to the adventure and to a surprising (and not quite believable) love. The historical context is fascinating and atmospheric, but the novel wavers between suspense and romance and never quite convinces as either.
Hews too close to stereotype. Not bad, but mildly disappointing.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61695-049-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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