An eccentric, engaging mix of melodrama and erudition.
A true tale of love and madness in Belle Epoque Vienna serves as the basis for this Booker nominee.
Princess Louise was the daughter of Leopold II—King of Belgium and the genocidal owner and self-styled emperor of the Congo Free State—and the wife of Philipp, Prince of Saxe-Coburg. Géza Mattachich was a Croatian of dubious pedigree and a minor officer in the Austrian army. The very public affair between this unlikely pair scandalized Viennese society and delighted fin-de-siècle leftists. Jacobson (The God-Fearer, 1993, etc.) begins his story in 1895, when Louise and Mattachich both fall prey to love—or, at the very least, intense fascination—at first sight, following the pair from the earliest moments of their liaison and into ignominy, exile and insanity. It’s the sort of story that would seem preposterous if it weren’t fact-based, and Louise and Mattachich are characters so outsized that they would lack all credibility as pure invention. Despite their very different backgrounds, the lovers actually have a great deal in common. Both are greedy, venal, paranoid and spectacularly self-centered. Their obsessive romance is, in fact, a sort of narcissism: What they seem to adore most in each other is the self reflected back. Shared psychopathology is, of course, no guarantee of domestic bliss, and Louise’s social position, combined with the duo’s utter lack of discretion, pretty much precludes any happily-ever-after ending. Instead of a fairy-tale romance, then, this is an elegant, astute and smartly entertaining depiction of an emotional train wreck. Jacobson makes excellent use of historical research. His narrative is buttressed with informative and opinionated footnotes, and he includes telling excerpts from the memoirs of Louise and Mattachich. Histrionic and fabulously self-serving quotes from the principals are balanced by the narrator’s incisive, occasionally ironic and coolly engaging tone.
An eccentric, engaging mix of melodrama and erudition.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-8103-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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