A feverish chronicle of family disintegration rendered as an exhilarating cacophony of conflicting voices: the fourth novel from an award-winning Portuguese author to be translated into English (An Explanation of the Birds, 1991, etc.). Its action occurs seven years after a Communist revolution that confiscated the property of Lisbon's landed aristocracy and drove its possessors into exile in neighboring Spainand in the resentful remembrances of the members of a nameless family whom Louis-Ferdinand CÇline or Erskine Caldwell would be proud to have created (though in fact they're reminiscent of the cupidinous grotesques who populate the fiction of Spain's Nobel Prize-winner Camilo JosÇ Cela). The novel turns on the question of whether its senile patriarch's legendary wealth does still exist, oras some allegehas instead been ``all squandered away in casinos, whorehouses, hospitals and doctors for the two idiots''? But mongoloidism and retardation are only the most visible blemishes sported by a wolfish clan whose favorite pastimes include theft, adultery, rape, incest, murderous fantasizing (if not outright murder), and teaching parrots to shriek out obscenities. It's probably beside the point that Antunes's characters seem hysterically overdrawn; his mixtures of realistic narration, memory, and fantasy frequently impenetrable; and his condemnation of upper-class swinishness numbingly shrill. The novel is densely packed with surrealistically heightened detail and amusingly nasty figurative language (e.g., ``Her fingers climbed up his wrist the way crabs climb up rocks at low tide''). Antunes is not a subtle writerone imagines disco music throbbing and strobe lights winking while reading him. But for all this frenzied book's wretched excess, the fury of its rhetoric takes on all but irresistible momentum, dragging the reader, albeit kicking and screaming, into its lunatic orbit.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-8021-1575-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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