A harshly playful, lengthy attack on the mystique of an ancient era.
Fischer presents a darkly comedic novel about a eunuch in the court of Nebuchadnezzar II in this fiction debut.
The narrator, Nergal, is a self-described “middle-aged eunuch slave-scribe.” His master is Nebuchadnezzar II, the king of the Babylonian empire. Nebuchadnezzar is seated upon the throne of the Golden Bull and is viewed as a living god. There is a belief that the king must sire a certain number of bastard children every year if the empire is to enjoy agricultural success. It is partly for this purpose that the king maintains such an extensive harem. Yet the aging monarch is not always effective at siring. Nergal is an official scribe of the harem, but the official narrative paints over much of the true horror that Nergal experiences firsthand. When the unfortunate eunuch slave-scribe is not helping Nebuchadnezzar become erect by taking the king’s “skewer of undercooked chicken” in his hands, he is attempting to help the king through his constipation, or simply trying to cheer him up. Suffering from complaints including insomnia and depression, Nebuchadnezzar is hardly the indestructible warrior-king figure the common people are led to believe he is. And despite all of Nergal’s efforts, times are tough in the empire: Droughts threaten the food supply, and lives are lost in bread riots. Even the palace orgies aren’t as good as they used to be. Nergal knows about the status of the empire at large because his brother, Uruk, is an important figure who can divine knowledge from such unlikely sources as a bull’s stomach or a sheep’s lung. What does the future hold? From the perspective of anyone truly in the know, it doesn’t look good.
Throughout the text, the reader learns a lot about Nergal’s difficult past and present. Much is written of his violent scribe father—this man would beat Uruk and Nergal if they didn’t complete their assignments, but also beat them if they did. A tone of bleak humor permeates the work. A description of Nergal’s father describes how, in life, the man was “tall and cadaverous, and in death, his features had changed little.” Nergal is infatuated with a concubine named Siduri. Could anything be sadder than a eunuch who loves a concubine? It may be an obvious conflict, but it nevertheless provides the story with tension. Though Nergal’s misery is played for laughs, the reader cannot help but feel sympathy for such a sad sack. He is a protagonist who digs into the vileness and depravity all around him—and that depravity can be extraneous; the reader is constantly reminded of brutal practices like the king’s habit of bathing in the blood and the mutilated bodies of his enemies (not to mention the Codex Castratum). Ancient accounts of these times can teach us much, but Nergal’s perspective brings to life just how awful things must really have been. Any fantasies about the era are blown away with reminders of atrocities—such as how the harem is populated by enslaved girls who were taken violently from their homes.
A harshly playful, lengthy attack on the mystique of an ancient era.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781732579941
Page Count: 502
Publisher: The Gabbro Head Press
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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