Szczypiorski (The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman, 1990) reaches back to an anti-Semitic persecution in 15th-century Brabant for this allegory, first published in Poland in 1970, of the seductive appeal of totalitarianism. Three years after a plague in 1458 wiped out a fifth of its inhabitants, the Burgundian town of Arras is plunged into political frenzy by the death of a horse after its owner was allegedly cursed by his Jewish neighbor Tselus. Arrested and interrogated, Tselus kills himself before charges can be preferred, but the townspeople, seized by rabid anti-Semitism, proceed to rob, exile, and kill not only the local Jews but anyone who expresses sympathy for them, offers criticism of the new orthodoxy of hysteria, or, finally, shows any threateningly aberrant behavior: feeding Jewish citizens, debauchery, conducting scientific dissections. The parallels with the rise of Fascism are obvious, but Szczypiorski, who's after something more subtle, focuses on the running debate between Albert, the holy elder who argues first that purging the town's Jewish presence doesn't purge its evil inclinations—and then, on his deathbed, that he sought to lead the town to freedom through an experience of ``the bitterness of evil''—and the royal bastard Prince David, the absentee Bishop of Utrecht, who begins by speaking for rationality but ends by declaring a ``Sunday of Forgiveness, Cancellation, and Forgetting'' that will render the whole ugly episode null and void. The fulcrum of this debate is a lordly, sensitive student named Jan, who's torn between his loyalty to both Albert and David. Only after he himself is arrested on trumped-up charges does he find his concern for his own and the town's welfare colliding with the need for collective memory, however much in conflict it is with individual experience. But don't be put off by such an abstract summary: this is really a dramatic fable that looks back to Kafka's allegories, and behind them to Dostoyevsky's ``Grand Inquisitor.''
Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8021-1173-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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