Think the brutal realities of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian set among the primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest frontier.
From the great rain-drenched woods of America’s northwest, Hart (Then Came the Evening, 2009) offers a Hobbesian saga—men and women against nature, and themselves, in struggles solitary and poor, nasty and brutish.
The 20th century is nigh. Jacob Ellstrom, doctor’s bag and beautiful wife, Nell, in hand, washes up at Harbor, a coastal settlement north of Portland, a place so rich in timber as to draw "ax-wielding maniacs hacking at the world." Nell gives birth to a son, Duncan, but Jacob’s soon found to be a fraud rather than a trained physician, and he wreaks vengeance on Nell. One beating is near fatal. With help, Nell fakes her death and flees. Jacob, fearing the noose, heads to the woods. Abandoned young Duncan grows up admiring Bellhouse and Tartan, part-time union organizers and full-time thieves. He also loves Teresa, a rich mill owner’s daughter. That romance ends a decade later when Duncan murders Teresa’s father and, like his own father, takes to the woods rather than face justice. Hart’s sense of place—terrain, weather, frontier people—is brilliant, every scene an homage to Robert Altman’s epic McCabe and Mrs. Miller. It’s a tale of robber barons, "clean, covetous and mean," and millworkers, lumberjacks and feral toughs, "the maimed and the mutinous, low-graders, the sick-brained...like shavings of metal stuck to a greasy magnet." The story is told from different points of view: Duncan, Jacob, Nell, Tartan and Native Americans "amazed at the ferocity of the whites." There are dazzling characterizations like Matius, Jacob’s psychopathic brother, and Kozmin, an immigrant hermit who weaves in an allegorical tale of Tarakanov, a Russian long-ago marooned in Alaska. In short, declarative sentences building into a dense, deep and illuminating narrative, Hart writes of greed and ambition and of fathers and sons who have "gone beyond forgiveness and entered a foreign and evil land."
Think the brutal realities of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian set among the primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest frontier.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229774-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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