O’Callaghan anatomizes these emotional and psychological odysseys, making a narrative light on incident compellingly...
Through one day in a yearslong extramarital affair, an Irish writer looks at intimacy and estrangement in an impressive work.
For more than 20 years, Michael and Caitlin have been meeting on the first Tuesday of every month and sharing a few hours in a cheap hotel in the run-down New York City beach community of Coney Island. On the winter day that dominates the story, he is 48 and she’s about 44. They first appear walking through bitter cold and wind. The book’s third sentence reads: “This is bleakness without respite.” O’Callaghan (The Dead House, 2018, etc.) also opens with some of the book’s most impressive writing, fistfuls of muscular prose that channels Seamus Heaney: “the enormous sprawl of ocean that, in close, bucks and moils. Frothing needlepoint flecks mottle a surface dull as lead, great furred bilges of surf break hard against the shoreline.” It’s almost showy, maybe forced—“needlepoint”? The prose settles down while remaining exceptional, elegiac and eloquent, in conveying insight and sympathy for the small cast’s two main players as they face an uncertain future. Michael and his wife, Barbara, grew apart when their firstborn died after 14 weeks in ICU, and Barbara has recently been diagnosed with cancer. Caitlin and her husband have come to accept the distance between them, and she knows he has had affairs. Recently he’s been offered a promotion and transfer to Peoria, Illinois. It’s clear that “bleakness without respite” doesn’t apply just to Coney Island in winter. Hard choices loom. Though age and guilt have colored their precious Tuesdays, the lovers still treasure them, but as the hours pass, they wonder if the moment has come for a long-avoided decision.
O’Callaghan anatomizes these emotional and psychological odysseys, making a narrative light on incident compellingly readable.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285656-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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