An enchanting novel, full of life, about the end of life.
The late Czech novelist, both banned and renowned in his homeland, offers a uniquely compelling blend of parable, fantasy, social realism and testament to the power of storytelling.
Originally issued in 1981 and belatedly translated into English, this novel (by the author of I Served the King of England, 1971, etc.) offers stream-of-consciousness narration by an unnamed woman in her mid-60s who lives with her husband and uncle in a castle that has been converted into an old-age home. Much of what she writes is memory, some is description of her daily activities, much of it might be illusion. Wafting through the air is the romantic, string-laden musical composition that gives the book its title, a timeless reverie that is omnipresent though some may not acknowledge or even hear it. She shares the stories of others, witnesses to a distant past, and she sees what they do: “I saw there what could no longer be seen, but what my friends and I did see, those old witnesses to old times, of which I myself was now one.” Though each chapter is a single paragraph, with some very long sentences, the voice of the narrator is spellbinding, even as the reader becomes less sure of her credibility. Beyond that voice, there isn’t much of a plot except the decline toward death that is everyone’s plot. She tells of her life in “the little town where time stood still,” where her husband ran the brewery and she was the envy of the other women. “Yes, it was a good thing I’d been so proud, that I’d stayed so young and pretty for so long,” she says, leaving the reader to wonder whether it really was a good thing or if she really was as pretty as she remembered. Time really hadn’t stood still: Communism cost her husband the brewery and the two of them their home, amid “huge parades that raise their fist at everything old.” As she reflects, “[w]hat is life? Everything that once was, everything an old person thinks back on and tells you stories about, everything that no longer matters and is gone for good.”
An enchanting novel, full of life, about the end of life.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-981955-73-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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