Readers who appreciate historical fiction will find much to like, and if Goldstein could apply the same level of ability to...
Two historians journey to France to find a mysterious village with ties to historic Jewish persecution in Goldstein’s (Princess of the Blood, 2007, etc.) new novel.
When Professor Henry “Henner” Marcus receives a letter from his cousin Nina who disappeared five years ago, he has acute misgivings about traveling from Chicago to Toulouse with a large sum of money, as per Nina’s instructions. But Henner’s strong sense of family and academic curiosity drive him to commit to the adventure. When Nina finally shows herself, Henner is drawn further into the mystery through a codex allegedly written by Dina, a Jewish woman who founded a community high in the Pyrenees Mountains that has retained its isolation over the centuries; it is Valladine—the place where Nina was born during her parents’ escape from the Nazis and where she returns as an adult when she abandons her academic career. Henner and Nina’s friend Etoile set to the task of translating the codex while Nina returns to her adopted medieval village, where she may face punishment for removing the document. Parallels and reflections abound among the several interwoven plot lines: Dina’s story, Nina’s story, Henner’s family history and contemporary events. Goldstein—historian, literary translator and editor—shows a talent for making historical events feel relevant and alive. Dina’s story is captivating; Goldstein describes the various settings—a mountain village, a forlorn jail cell—with prose that is both aesthetically pleasing and intellectually satisfying. She wavers, however, on her more contemporary subjects. She uses the same language when following Henner, Etoile and Nina on their travels through 1970s France and America as she does when describing the 1300s. Even their conversations sport a pedantic tone with a liberal peppering of highbrow vocabulary; the result is a constant, solemn cadence that grows heavy-handed over 400 pages.
Readers who appreciate historical fiction will find much to like, and if Goldstein could apply the same level of ability to her modern-day characters as she does to her historical figures, the book may find a broader audience.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450251082
Page Count: 412
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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