Through all the histrionics, the characters remain one-dimensional.
Love! Betrayal! Remorse! Trench warfare! A high-flown melodrama about three people trapped in a romantic imbroglio while serving in World War I.
This is Lee’s first novel, following multiple nonfiction works about Anne Frank and her family (The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, 2003, etc.). Ted Eden is a golden English lad, loved by his fellow schoolboys and his best friend Alex Dyer, the main character here. On an outing to Westminster Abbey in 1899, he tells the skeptical Alex it would be a fine thing to die for one’s country. In 1914, inevitably, Ted answers the call; Alex joins him in France, but as a war correspondent, and big slabs of the novel consist of his frontline reporting. By this time both men have fallen in love…with the same woman. Ted had met beautiful Clare at a London dinner party, sensed her sad emptiness (she had been raped by her stepfather when she was 13), proposed and been accepted. Before their marriage he introduces her to Alex. Their eyes lock; this is beyond love; it’s a passion for the ages, “which knew no boundaries, no kindness, no logic.” Nonetheless, Clare marries the vulnerable Ted; after all, she loves him, though not with the same “rage.” She too goes to France, as a nurse. On a hospital train she encounters her dying stepfather and refuses him forgiveness. On leave in London, Alex and Clare become lovers, though eaten up by guilt. Then Alex, to ease his conscience, tells Ted about their affair, ignoring Clare’s warning that the revelation will kill him. Oh boy, is she right. Ted goes looking for death and finds it. Alex comes upon the dying man in the trenches as he proclaims, “Bury me with glory or none at all.” And so it comes to pass, thanks to string-pulling and shoveling by Alex. The Unknown Warrior is buried in Westminster Abbey with full military honors, and Alex can find some peace, knowing the Warrior is Ted.
Through all the histrionics, the characters remain one-dimensional.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-123881-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
A curious fusion of the predictable and the unconventional which, given the appetite for Paris, love, and wartime tragedy,...
While a timid French music teacher grieves the death of her partner, outside, on the streets of Paris, his ghost lingers, lending historical context and soulful musings to a story of unresolved anguish and late love.
Chaudhry’s elegant debut rests on an unusual and risky premise: It is narrated in part by a soul in limbo. Julien Dalsace has died before the story opens, and his old-fashioned voice sets the scene: “The scent of lilacs on the breeze stirs dormant phantoms to life, but music is sorcery more potent.” We are in Paris in the year of the bicentennial, 1989, observing, like Julien, the struggles of his surviving partner, Sylvie, to cope with her loss. Julien, although spectral, is the novel’s lynchpin. The romance between him—an older, upper-class, married Jewish psychologist—and the quiveringly sensitive piano teacher is the beating heart of the story. But there’s another thread, taking the reader back to 1942, when the Jews of Paris were rounded up and deported, including Julien’s sister, Clara, and her twin daughters. Julien never forgave himself for his absence in London during World War II and his failure to save Clara, but a secret folder that emerges after his death offers Sylvie the opportunity to conclude his quest to discover the fate of Clara’s girls. Julien’s curious perspective—on history, on other ghosts, on the beauty but complexity of France generally and the Île Saint-Louis, his corner of Paris, in particular—is the novel’s most original aspect. Elsewhere, while Chaudhry brings a kind of reverent seriousness to events both past and present, her approach is more familiar. Characters are often simple, like the kindly Jewish baker, the protective (but kindly) concierge, the sympathetic American lodgers, and even Sylvie’s anthropomorphized terrier, Coco. And resolutions, even sad ones, arrive with coincidence and ease.
A curious fusion of the predictable and the unconventional which, given the appetite for Paris, love, and wartime tragedy, might well touch a popular nerve.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54460-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories...
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.
When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. “It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands.” By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and “the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses.” This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what’s to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms.
Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-28014-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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