“You cannot trust a murderer to have a fancy prose style.” Well, you can here—in this wild tour of mid-millennium debauchery.
A frolicking and rampaging debut about a larger-than-life painter, courtesy of Britisher Peachment, a longtime writer on art, opera, and ballet.
“A brief ecstasy, a brief satisfaction of my itch,” Caravaggio says in a prologue, speaking of murder: “and then nothing more than the sadness that washes over you after coupling. And then the growing desire for more. There was drinking and brawling and whoring and sodomy.” And indeed, we are given the crude and bumptious story of a true life treated with great liberty. Michelangelo Merisi (later Caravaggio) never did get on with his parents (“For how can it be that two stupid people can give birth to a child more intelligent than they?”), so it’s a good thing he’s in Milan, where the most important things are fencing and sex with anything. At 18, he’s off for Venice, where the whores are the best in all of Europe and where he has a relationship with the philosopher Bruno, all the while receiving the best possible education in aesthetics. The picaresque moves next to Rome, the only place in the world for a painter, where there are many more young boys and girls to choose from. By now, Caravaggio is famous and working on ceilings (“It’s still there on the ceiling if you want to go see it”). Poor Bruno is burned at the stake, but no bother: Caravaggio simply blows his money on whores and gambling. The Vatican will be after his shorts before long, and Caravaggio is conceited enough to wind up in a duel, but we’ve already been told that murder is no big deal. Still—how does he find epitaphs to his chapters that come from two centuries after his death? Perhaps through immortality, which may be his most important legacy: “Cast a cold eye on it all, and on my work. I am still alive.”
“You cannot trust a murderer to have a fancy prose style.” Well, you can here—in this wild tour of mid-millennium debauchery.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31448-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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