Finely crafted, disarmingly casual prose that quietly penetrates the reader’s mind and heart.
After two novels (The Communist's Daughter, 2007, etc.) prominently featuring politics and war, Bock offers a deceptively modest domestic drama about a man returning to Toronto from Italy after the breakup of his marriage.
After his Italian wife, Isabel, leaves him and takes up with another man, expat Canadian Charlie decides to escape his emotional pain by returning to Toronto to open a new branch of the language school chain he owns. He plans to be gone for one year and to stay in constant touch with his 12-year-old daughter, Ava. In Canada, Charlie reconnects with his older brother, Nate, from whom he’s been estranged since chauvinist swine Nate behaved particularly boorishly to Isabel years before. Now going through his own ugly divorce and desperate to maintain his relationship with his two sons, Nate at first seems chastened. But Charlie gradually realizes that Nate has not changed as much as he’d like to pretend and is rabidly bitter that the boys prefer staying with his ex-wife and her easygoing boyfriend. Charlie, who desperately misses Ava and questions why he decided to take himself out of her life, becomes increasingly protective of Nate’s boys. He is still pining for Isabel as well as Ava when he runs into his long-lost first love, Holly; he was running away from their troubled relationship when he first met Isabel. Once Charlie corrects his misreading of past events, he begins to take responsibility for his life. And by the time Nate spirals out of control, Charlie understands how fundamentally different a man is from his brother. The elliptical narrative, which sometimes leaves out connecting details, is more intriguing than confusing as Charlie sorts out the truth. On one level, the novel captures the difficulty men have reading women; on a deeper level, Bock plumbs issues of memory, moral responsibility and what constitutes a man’s real love for a woman.
Finely crafted, disarmingly casual prose that quietly penetrates the reader’s mind and heart.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-400-04463-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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