Australian native Brothers' epic about an Argentine family torn apart by the 1976 military coup is enjoyable as it goes but...
After 19-year-old Graciela Ferrero and her fiance are "disappeared" by Argentina's military junta in the summer of 1976 during a coup, her parents, Osvaldo and Yolanda, devote their lives to finding her—or, failing that, the baby with whom they learn she was pregnant.
To add to the parents' anguish, Osvaldo, a distinguished physician, has been forced to flee to Paris to avoid reprisals for the editorial cartoons he contributed to a local magazine. With their married older daughter, Julieta, living in Miami, safe but distant, the family couldn't be more divided. Plenty of bad news awaits, but Osvaldo and Yolanda's hopes for finding their granddaughter, Ana, refuse to fade even as the years go by. With no knowledge of her origins—or the meaning of the identifying crosses Graciela shrewdly etched behind her ear with a needle—she has been raised by a loving family with its own hidden truths. While in the military, her adoptive father was guilty of atrocities. Brothers, who as a journalist spent time in Latin America, is at her best capturing the pitched atmosphere of Buenos Aires as the coup unfolds. "It's as if something has interfered with the barometer, pressure added to the air we breathe," says Osvaldo, by then accustomed to the "pop-pop of gunshots" in the middle of the night and pots and saucepans rattling as tanks roll through town. As solid as the storytelling is, though, and as much as the events resonate with today's political upheavals, the novel is too controlled and conventional to have the kind of nervy impact it should—or avoid being dwarfed by actual events. It's almost too pleasurable a read.
Australian native Brothers' epic about an Argentine family torn apart by the 1976 military coup is enjoyable as it goes but lacks the creative spark or sense of risk to stand apart.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 9781632860163
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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