Sublime tales that, even in their brevity, make a lasting impression.
Characters in Beritan’s debut short-story collection seem to be frozen in time and memories.
In the opening title story, young Delbar lives with her parents in an early-20th century Kurdish village. She weaves carpets that sell well in the city; her parents come to rely on the income and, as such, hope she doesn’t leave their home. But Delbar is mesmerized by a mysterious singing man who’s apparently hidden among trees that were planted years ago by someone who’d tragically lost his love. Delbar is just one of a handful of characters in this tiny collection who are stuck. Mahtab, in “The Doughy Granny,” stays at home while her husband, Gypsy, travels, peddling his goods. Gypsy, bizarrely troubled by his wife’s sustaining beauty and happiness, finds a way to shatter her well-being. The longest story, “Half-Forgotten Dream,” centers on the elderly Anna as she reminisces about years she’s missed with a boy she once grew close to. Beritan locates these tales in striking settings, from a snowy winter evening to the resort town of Sliema on the island of Malta. In keeping with the book’s theme, these places function as veritable hubs for others’ passing lives, as when tourists crowd Sliema’s beach and a London railway station while memory-laden Anna remains inside, staring into a mirror. Historical touches enrich the narratives; Kurds endure civil unrest and the Persianization of their culture, and the Korean conflict disquiets a world still reeling from World War II. The author’s prose offers illustrative descriptions, such as this impression of London’s Oxford Street: “The storefronts were decked with large displays, and people walking amid the enormous department stores and fashion stores seemed dizzy and disoriented, entranced by the thriving commercial environment of that era.” It’s somewhat disappointing that this book is so compact—it includes only five stories, with the final selection, filled with a narrator’s holiday recollections, clocking in at a mere few pages.
Sublime tales that, even in their brevity, make a lasting impression.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 79
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.
Who was Shakespeare?
Move over, Earl of Oxford and Francis Bacon: There’s another contender for the true author of plays attributed to the bard of Stratford—Emilia Bassano, a clever, outspoken, educated woman who takes center stage in Picoult’s spirited novel. Of Italian heritage, from a family of court musicians, Emilia was a hidden Jew and the courtesan of a much older nobleman who vetted plays to be performed for Queen Elizabeth. She was well traveled—unlike Shakespeare, she visited Italy and Denmark, where, Picoult imagines, she may have met Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and was familiar with court intrigue and English law. “Every gap in Shakespeare’s life or knowledge that has had to be explained away by scholars, she somehow fills,” Picoult writes. Encouraged by her lover, Emilia wrote plays and poetry, but 16th-century England was not ready for a female writer. Picoult interweaves Emilia’s story with that of her descendant Melina Green, an aspiring playwright, who encounters the same sexist barriers to making herself heard that Emilia faced. In alternating chapters, Picoult follows Melina’s frustrated efforts to get a play produced—a play about Emilia, who Melina is certain sold her work to Shakespeare. Melina’s play, By Any Other Name, “wasn’t meant to be a fiction; it was meant to be the resurrection of an erasure.” Picoult creates a richly detailed portrait of daily life in Elizabethan England, from sumptuous castles to seedy hovels. Melina’s story is less vivid: Where Emilia found support from the witty Christopher Marlowe, Melina has a fashion-loving gay roommate; where Emilia faces the ravages of repeated outbreaks of plague, for Melina, Covid-19 occurs largely offstage; where Emilia has a passionate affair with the adoring Earl of Southampton, Melina’s lover is an awkward New York Times theater critic. It’s Emilia’s story, and Picoult lovingly brings her to life.
A vibrant tale of a remarkable woman.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593497210
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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