Anyone who hasn’t read the original Jeeves and Wooster stories should start with the master himself, but fans longing for...
Everyone and his butler thinks he can do the Wodehouse voice. They’re all wrong, but Schott’s version, a painstaking facsimile rendered in spun sugar, has its own particular charm.
From 1915 to 1974, the British humorist and immortal genius P.G. Wodehouse tickled readers’ palates with tales of the well-born, well-heeled Bertie Wooster and his unflappable valet, Jeeves. Wodehouse balanced frenetic plots with wordplay that drew its zing from the contrast between Bertie’s breeziness and Jeeves’ formality. All the elements are here in Schott’s version: country weekends with the “Aged Relative,” impersonations, taxi chases, narrow escapes across rooftops, matrimonial engagements that threaten like thunderstorms. Familiar characters stay in character: Madeline Bassett moons over daisy chains, Roderick Spode stomps around in his fascist black shorts, Uncle Tom obsesses over antique silver, and Bingo, Freddie, Barmy, Tuppy, and Catsmeat booze it up with Bertie at the Drones Club. Schott, known for his charming trivia (Schott's Quintessential Miscellany, 2011, etc.), is capable of true Wodehousian flights in lines like “From across the auditorium came a clatter of chairs and the resounding ‘thud’ of a tall man overestimating a low door” or “The majority of Dronesmen suffer from advanced cases of ergophobia—a sloth-inducing affliction that is as crippling as it is contagious. Medical Science has hitherto been reluctant to recognize ergophobia as a genuine diagnosis, but if Medical Science ever popped into the Drones Club on a weekday afternoon, then Medical Science’s bow tie would spin round and round in amazement.” But where the master’s own voice seems to burble forth as effortlessly as a gutter’s in a downpour, Schott gives the impression of infinite—if gleeful—labor. He even includes endnotes. The endnotes are a joy, as one might expect from the author of Schott’s Miscellany, but still.
Anyone who hasn’t read the original Jeeves and Wooster stories should start with the master himself, but fans longing for more will welcome Schott’s homage, which was authorized by the Wodehouse estate.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-52460-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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