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THE DETOUR

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

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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THE SECRET HISTORY

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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