A compelling psychological study, a thoughtful tracing of the birth of a new art form and an atmospheric portrait of...
Smith’s beautifully written debut uses the life of photography’s inventor as the framework for a touching tale of youthful love regained in maturity.
In the spring of 1847, 58-year-old Louis Daguerre is wealthy and famous, thanks to his discovery of the process by which visual images can be given physical reality: “[H]ere was time stolen, wafered, and pressed onto silvered copper; here were nature’s blueprints, transcripts of light . . . replicated in nuance, shadow, and substance.” Mortally ill from exposure to the toxic chemicals used in that process, he’s convinced by one of his “mercury visions” that the world is about to end. Daguerre asks his friend Charles Baudelaire to help him find a woman willing to pose naked for a daguerreotype; it’s one of the images he wants to immortalize before the apocalypse. He’s also trying to find Isobel Le Fournier, the family maid he fell in love with when he was 12, on the same day he first was mesmerized by the magical qualities of sunlight. Isobel slipped out of his life the year he went to Paris as apprentice to a scene painter, but Louis remained haunted by his lost love as he pursued his goal of capturing the world around him with a realism beyond painting. Skillfully interweaving Daguerre’s memories with the present-day action, the author joins the two narrative strands when Louis learns that his nude model, Chloe, is Isobel’s daughter (a wild coincidence that passes muster in the novel’s dreamlike atmosphere). Violence, which has shadowed Daguerre’s life since his birth during the French Revolution, once again marks him during the disturbances of 1848, when Louis is shot and Chloe takes him to her mother to be healed. In the countryside, the bitter older woman and her chastened but still-ardent suitor finally come to terms with their past and steal a few weeks of happiness they both know cannot last.
A compelling psychological study, a thoughtful tracing of the birth of a new art form and an atmospheric portrait of 19th-century France: impressive on all three counts.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7114-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gentle, soft-focus affair that doesn’t entirely avoid queasiness and cliché in its efforts to charm.
A Jewish immigrant goes to extreme lengths to become British in a bittersweet, uneven comic debut.
Handed a book of helpful hints on assimilation as he arrives in England from Berlin in 1937, Jack Rosenblum takes the list of suggestions to heart in this story based on the experience of the author’s grandparents. Jack quickly establishes a successful carpet factory in London, which pays for his oh-so-English expenses: a fine house, a Savile Row suit, a Jaguar car. But money can’t buy him what he craves most deeply, membership to an English golf club—undeclared racism keeps Jews tidily excluded from these. So Jack decides to construct his own golf course, on an idyllic plot of Dorset countryside. Neglecting his business and his sad wife, Jack hurls himself into the task, thereby discovering a different kind of Englishness colored by country characters, landscape, history and myth. Solomons’ prose tips between the awkward and the rhapsodic in a meandering tale in which grave issues such as anti-Semitism, survival and ruin never seem to weigh too heavily. Setbacks mount, but fairy-tale turns of event and acts of loyalty mean the golf course is completed in time for the coronation of Elizabeth II, a crowning moment of achievement and acceptance for Jack Rose-in-Bloom.
A gentle, soft-focus affair that doesn’t entirely avoid queasiness and cliché in its efforts to charm.Pub Date: June 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-07758-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Seven Footer Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Despite clashes with his own superiors as well as with French foes, the durable British hero of Cornwell's splendid series (Sharpe's Devil, 1992, etc.) soldiers on during a bloody turning-point campaign in the Peninsular War. In the spring of 1811, Captain Richard Sharpe and his riflemen are reconnoitering the craggy borderland through which Napoleon's troops may launch another invasion of Portugal from their bases in Spain. The patrol surprises a band of dragoons who've been pillaging a mountain village, and Sharpe (an officer but not a gentleman, commissioned from the ranks) orders the execution of two rapists. The summary shootings earn him the personal hatred of the dead men's preternaturally vicious commanding officer, General Guy Loup of the feared Wolf Brigade. Back in camp, an unrepentant Sharpe is detailed to train an Irish guards company dispatched for geopolitical reasons from Spain's royal court to Viscount Wellington's coalition forces. Meanwhile, Loup, with inside help from his mistress, Juanita de Elia (a well-born Spanish courtesan who loves an expatriate Irish lord serving under Wellington), stages a night raid on the fort held by Sharpe and his outmanned crew. The defenders repulse this assault with sizable losses on both sides, but Sharpe learns he's being groomed as a scapegoat, again for reasons that have more to do with diplomatic exigencies than miliary competence. In a savage three-day engagement fought around the Fuentes de Onore, he redeems himself by beating back a climactic French charge and dispatching his sworn enemy in hand-to-hand combat described with as vivid a brutality as readers are likely to find this side of a forensic reference book. More great adventure from one of the most accomplished and stylish storytellers now writing. This time, Sharpe's new print appearance coincides with Masterpiece Theatre's adaptation of three previous books in the series.
Pub Date: May 24, 1995
ISBN: 0060932287
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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