A cleareyed, unsentimental, yet romantic treatment of a clandestine romance.
Amid the waning days of World War II, Ingrid Bergman meets the dashing war photographer Robert Capa.
Poet and screenplay writer Greenhalgh’s (Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, 2009, etc.) novel evokes a world of glamour and danger. Traveling from battle to battle, Robert Capa still grieves for his business partner and fiancee, Gerda Taro (nee Pohorylle), who died in Madrid documenting the Spanish Civil War. Alcohol and gambling, however, keep those feelings tamped down. The acclaimed star of Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls and Gaslight, Bergman leads a quiet life in a chilly marriage to Petter Lindstrom. Lindstrom controls and criticizes Bergman’s every move, even pulling her home from her own Academy Award celebration. Invited to entertain the American troops in Europe, Bergman longs to escape, even though it means leaving her young daughter, Pia, behind. From across the lobby—crowded with the starlet’s admirers—of the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Capa glimpses Bergman’s radiantly beautiful face. Emboldened by his friend—future novelist Irwin Shaw—Capa invites Bergman to dinner, and she surprisingly accepts, setting in motion a whirlwind affair. As in any romantic film, they linger at cafes, dance cheek to cheek, stroll along the Tuileries Garden, steal kisses behind her chaperone’s back and stormily declare their love impossible. After all, Capa thrives on the adrenaline rush of covering war zones, and eventually, Bergman will have to return home. But if their affair becomes public, she may have little to return home to, for a disgraced Bergman is an unemployed Bergman. Greenhalgh sometimes awkwardly shifts between first-person narration, revealing Capa’s thoughts, and third-person narration, speculating on Bergman’s. The magnitude of the liaison, however, doesn’t daunt him; he captures it just as a besotted photographer might capture a starlet’s true gaze.
A cleareyed, unsentimental, yet romantic treatment of a clandestine romance.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03496-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
PROFILES
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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