A sardonic take on human nature and a wry deconstruction of the "banality of evil."
A young Irish art historian living in Rome leads a tour for two men he calls The Flatulent Windbag and The Constipated Prick.
That’s Hitler and Mussolini. The motive for Hitler's 1938 visit is to seek Italian support for his Lebensrauming—gobbling up a nation or six—while the Italians want to be serious players on the international scene. When the multilingual art historian, Colgan, is drafted to guide the two men around some museums, Hitler takes a shine to him and demands he accompany the party on the entire tour, riding in Hitler’s personal railway car. The novel takes the form of a memoir, an expiation, written by Colgan in 1968 for his daughter, a flower child who's discovered a news clipping of the event.Who could have thought Nazi cretins could have authored the Holocaust? The setting is rendered in broad strokes, the plot based on observation rather than action. The heart lies in Colgan’s nuanced characterizations—humanizations?—of Hitler and Mussolini. With spare input from the entourage—Goebbels, Ribbentrop, etc.—the focus is on Colgan’s interactions with the dictators, which shine with bons mots, droll insights into human behavior, and distinctively witty turns of phrase—"I wasn’t exactly gruntled by my day in Naples." Hitler takes most of the spotlight, with a stunning anecdote of his volcanic apoplectic rage. The egoist Mussolini is shadowed by the tragic. Within the first-person narrative, Davis (Standing at the Crossroads, 2011, etc.) offers whimsically sardonic yet serious miniessays on feminism, sex, Hitler’s mustache, obscure German literature, and the tragic pervasiveness of anti-Semitism.
A sardonic take on human nature and a wry deconstruction of the "banality of evil."Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57962-432-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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