Converting her nonfiction research into historical suspense, first-time novelist Simani challenges the integrity of acclaimed archaeologists Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson and George Smith.
In the mid-19th century, archaeologists’ discoveries in the Tigris-Euphrates region altered the biblical timeline. Taking the reader from Mesopotamia to Paris to London, Simani introduces real-life archaeologists Austen Layard, Jules Oppert, Fulgence Fresnel, Rawlinson and Smith, among many others (as the three-page list of characters will attest), showing how their lives and discoveries were intertwined, and how nearly all were affected by the machinations of Rawlinson. Taking on the uneducated, working-class but gifted Smith as his assistant, Rawlinson schools him in matters both archaeological and unethical. What to do if your dig is not as productive as you had hoped? Buy artifacts on the black market. Having trouble with a translation? Make it up. Research challenged by colleagues? Discredit theirs. As if forgery were not enough, Rawlinson also dabbles in anti-Semitism and racism. While he remains reprehensible, Simani’s exquisite character development imbues Smith, a man of humble origins, with sympathy. Oppert vacillates from being a main to a secondary character, but he is probably the most fascinating of the long list of them. The novel’s historical elements are well researched, and Simani displays an additional gift for weaving an engrossing love story, as evidenced by the relationship accounts of Layard, Oppert and Smith. The author occasionally allows her characters to engage in long, dull conversations, rehashing events that occurred off-screen, but otherwise she manages to create a mainly interesting mystery. A riveting tale of archaeological intrigue.
Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461052814
Page Count: 453
Publisher: The Third House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the "authorized" edition (Dutton's) and the "unauthorized" (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. Royalties from the "unauthorized" edition will go to the International Rescue Committee; Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as "an apologist for the Soviet regime". To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. (Solzhenitsyn was a political prisoner.) From the unrelenting cold without, to the conditions within, from the bathhouse to the latrine to the cells where survival for more than two weeks is impossible, this records the hopeless facts of existence as faced by thousands who went on "living like this, with your eyes on the ground". The Dutton edition has an excellent introduction providing an orientation on the political background to its appearance in Russia by Marvin Kalb. All involved in its publication (translators, introducers, etc.) claim for it great "artistic" values which we cannot share, although there is no question of its importance as a political and human document and as significant and tangible evidence of the de-Stalinization program.
Pub Date: June 15, 1963
ISBN: 0451228146
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Praeger
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1963
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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