The Tin Drum meets Life Is Beautiful in this tragicomic, one-of-a-kind novel.
If Dave Chapelle were a 10-year-old in Austria during World War II….
We’ve gotten used to laughing at the brutal absurdities of modern racism, but Third Reich comedy is still rare. British author and philosopher New (Gage Street Courtesan, 2013) proves it can be done. Here, the relentless eye for hypocrisy belongs to the youngest of four children born to an Aryan pastor and his Jewish wife. The Brinkmann family has been booted by the brownshirts out of the fatherland and into Austria shortly before that country, too, is taken over by Hitler. Through the eyes of a wise child growing up in the ever darkening shadow of the Final Solution, the most notable thing about the Nazi system is its utter ludicrousness. The kids can go into stores their mother can’t; one day the family is deemed unfit to own a Saint Bernard, pet bunnies, or a wireless radio; finally the children are yanked out of school, only to be ordered the next year to return. Perhaps this anti-Semitism won’t last, suggests one character, reasoning that the Führer is too intelligent not to see what a mistake it is. “Has she read Mein Kampf?” wonders our narrator. “Has anyone? Can anyone?” Of a buxom blonde biology teacher who measures her pupils’ skulls with calipers, he comments, “Race is to Frau Professor Forster what sex is to a nymphomaniac—she just can’t get enough of it.” Of a trip to Berlin: “The train leaves on time (what else are Führers for?). But the optimism, euphemisms, and know-nothingism around him finally wear thin as the war escalates and more and more people disappear. One person who doesn’t have the wool pulled over her eyes is the narrator's mother, Gabi, whose youthful conversion to Christianity hasn’t erased her Jewish-mother qualities, including a stubborn, single-minded focus on her children’s education. Nor will it protect her from Hitler’s plans for her race. Fortunately, the story does not end there.
The Tin Drum meets Life Is Beautiful in this tragicomic, one-of-a-kind novel.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-88-328567-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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