An assured novel borne along by a swiftly moving storyline that addresses the most profound issues with elegant humor. Let’s...
The first novel in 20 years from Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997, etc.) and a book worth the wait: a humane, engaged tale of love, politics, and no small amount of suffering.
Who is the fairest of them all, Anjum or Tilottama? Both are beautiful, each in her own way, but time has not been kind to either. Born with both male and female genitals and likened to the disappearing corpse-cleaning vultures of India, Anjum lives among ghosts, while Tilo has been caught up in an independence movement and risks execution at the hands of a coldly technocratic army officer. Roy’s latest begins as a near fairy tale that soon turns dark, full of characters and their meetings, accidental and orchestrated alike, in the streets, rooming houses, and business offices of Delhi: school friends become partners in political crime, lovers become strangers to one another. Of one such pair, Roy writes, "He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant’s mind. She, a woman trapped in a man’s body." But, Roy tells us, identities are what we make of them; in an early scene, the mother of a child the other children taunt as “She-He, He-She Hee!” seeks guidance in a temple consecrated to a Jewish merchant who moved from Armenia to Delhi, converted to Islam, and ended life dangerously committing blasphemy by virtue of his uncertainty about the nature of God. So it is with all the people of Roy’s book, each trying to live right in this world of “fucked-up unexpectedness.” Roy’s novel shows clear kinship with Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, a story that, like hers, begins and ends with death; the first and last place we see here is a cemetery. But there are other echoes, including a nicely subtle nod to Salman Rushdie, as Roy constructs a busy world in which characters cross boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and gender to find, yes, that utmost happiness of which the title speaks.
An assured novel borne along by a swiftly moving storyline that addresses the most profound issues with elegant humor. Let’s hope we won’t have to wait two decades for its successor.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-524-73315-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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