A suspenseful, atmospheric portrait of Berlin during Hitler’s rise.
In Berlin between the world wars, a trove of rediscovered works by Vincent van Gogh propels a story of passion and betrayal in the art world.
Clark (We That Are Left, 2015, etc.) situates this historical novel in a decade marked by economic, political, and cultural turmoil in Germany. The story is told in three sections. The first, set in 1923, focuses on Julius Köhler-Schultz, author of an acclaimed biography of van Gogh and “Germany’s pre-eminent art critic, composed, cultured and authoritative, a man garlanded with the privileges of lifelong success.” That life has been upended by the departure of his wife, Luisa, a hedonistic young woman half his age. She has taken with her their baby son and Julius’ most treasured painting, a van Gogh self-portrait. He misses the painting more. Julius meets Emmeline Eberhardt, an even more rebellious, even younger woman, an artist who will be first his protégé and then something more problematic. She is the main character in the book’s second section, set in 1927, as she explores her sexuality in Berlin’s demimonde. The lives of Julius and Emmeline become intertwined with that of a charming and mysterious young man. Matthias Rachmann, an aspiring art dealer, might be a true lover of art driven by aesthetic passion—or he might be an exceptionally intelligent grifter working a very long con. The book’s third section, set in 1933, consists of diary entries by Frank Berszacki, who was Rachmann’s attorney after he was charged with art forgery. Berszacki is Jewish, and he adds yet another layer to Matthias’ story while describing his own struggles with the rising tide of Nazism in Berlin. Clark’s mastery of historic and artistic details merges with skillful plotting and compelling characters in this accomplished novel.
A suspenseful, atmospheric portrait of Berlin during Hitler’s rise.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-544-14757-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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