This reboot of an ancient story is alternately fiery and plodding, but Tóibín plainly grasps the reasons for its...
Tóibín, an enthusiast of classic storytelling, from the Bible (The Testament of Mary, 2012) to Henry James (The Master, 2004), this time takes a crack at Greek mythology.
This novel of palace intrigue is inspired by the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, focusing on the House of Atreus’ murderous infighting. Clytemnestra is provoked into a homicidal rage toward her husband, King Agamemnon, for sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia to win the Trojan War. As Clytemnestra schemes with her lover, Aegisthus, to plot Agamemnon’s death and fill the power vacuum in his wake, her two other children, Orestes and Electra, are sent into exile. And though the children eventually make their way back into the palace halls and mom’s trust, paranoia abounds within every relationship (“a performance that started with smiles and ended with shrieks,” as Electra puts it). The novel is broken into sections focusing on Clytemnestra, Electra, and Orestes, and the novel’s intensity—and to a large degree, its success—depends on who’s doing the talking. Clytemnestra, narrating in the first person, is a captivating and terrifying figure, heartbroken and ruthless in her lust for power. (“The gurgling sound he would make when I cut his throat became my obsession,” she fumes.) But Orestes’ portion of the tale, narrated in the third person, runs at a low boil of mustier fable-speak despite being packed with themes of protection, vengeance, and self-defense. That makes the novel feel tonally disjointed, but throughout, Tóibín captures the way that corruption breeds resentment and how resentment almost unstoppably breeds violence. The original myths established these characters as the gods’ playthings, but Tóibín reframes this version in “a time when the gods are fading,” the better to lay the blame for our human failures plainly on ourselves.
This reboot of an ancient story is alternately fiery and plodding, but Tóibín plainly grasps the reasons for its timelessness.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4021-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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