An interesting speculation done clumsily in broad strokes.
Mozart puts the finishing touches on Don Giovanni with a little help from his friends—an idea that outshines the execution of it in a historical from the son of opera conductor Julius Rudel.
In the autumn of 1787, fresh off the success of The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart is in Prague and rehearsing his still-unfinished version of the Don Juan legend. It’s a frustrating time for the young composer as he grieves for his dead father, has doubts about his marriage to Constanze, and wrangles with his egomaniacal librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte. Coming to Mozart’s rescue is the Chevalier de Seingalt, the great rake and memoirist better known as Casanova. Rudel notes that Casanova, a middle-aged man by 1787, did in fact offer his Don Juan–like expertise to Mozart; and in this imagined version of events, he not only provides valuable insight into the mind of a seducer but also cures Mozart’s personal frustrations and rejuvenates his marriage. Added to this auspicious pairing of 18th-century figures is the advice—in letters written from the Bastille—of Casanova’s pal, the Marquis de Sade. Certainly it would be hard to invent a more colorful gallery of characters. But in the hands of first-timer Rudel (Classical Music Top 40, a music guide, not reviewed), these larger-than-life men become mere caricatures endowed with little beyond their trademark quirks: Mozart composes an overture in an hour, Casanova seduces sets of twins, and so on. The treatment of history is also clunky (“I’ve heard the trouble in Paris is getting worse. Some say there may be a revolution.” “Ridiculous. It could never happen”), and Mozart’s and Casanova’s speeches about the egalitarian potential of opera and the liberating energies of coitus, respectively, are repetitive and uninspired. “They liked it,” Mozart notes as the audience applauds at the end of Don Giovanni. “But did they understand?”
An interesting speculation done clumsily in broad strokes.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-87113-827-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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