Dreamlike, dense, original, this challenging novel has a cumulative power. Highly recommended.
In her third novel, acclaimed Brazilian luminary Lispector (The Chandelier, 2018, etc.) merges the personal with the mythopoetic in the story of a town transforming into a city and a girl observing it.
Lucrécia Neves lives with her widowed mother in São Geraldo, a place "already mingling some progress with the smell of the stable." Like the female protagonists in other Lispector novels, she is unremarkable, neither intelligent nor imaginative. "Her modest function...was: to look." On long walks through town and into the surrounding countryside she sees things "as a horse sees them," and her observation is linked to the reality of the thing itself. "Reality was needing the girl in order to have a shape...what was seen became her vague story." Seeing, she creates the city. The dense, vivid prose, frequent use of passive voice, close interiority, and dazzling observation already familiar to fans of Lispector's distinctive style are coupled here with a dreamlike surreality. Lucrécia is described at different points as having hooves and wings ("With monotonous and regular flapping she was flying in the darkness above the city"). Over the course of the novel she takes flirtatious walks, carries on insipid conversations, fights with her mother, marries a wealthy older man, moves to a big city, falls in love with someone unavailable. There are insights into relationships familial and matrimonial and unexpected flashes of humor ("Something without interest to anyone was happening, surely 'real life.' ") But what matters most is Lucrécia's way of seeing, which she continues even in sleep, "rubbing, forging, polishing, lathing, sculpting, the demented master-carpenter—preparing palely every night the material of the city." Her visionary function is essential and timeless. "When all the cities were erected with their names, they would destroy themselves anew....Upon the rubble horses would reappear announcing the rebirth of the old reality, their backs without riders. Because thus it had always been. Until a few men would tie them to wagons, once again erecting a city that they wouldn't understand, once again building, with innocent skill, the things. And then once more they'd need a pointing finger to give them their old names." Underpinning the novel are questions about gendered power, about time and the permanent and ephemeral. "And Lucrécia's, was that the true, surrendered life? the one that gets lost, the waves that rise furiously over the rocks, the mortal fragrance of flowers?"
Dreamlike, dense, original, this challenging novel has a cumulative power. Highly recommended.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2671-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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