Valmorbida belongs to a family that emigrated from Italy to Australia after World War II, and the wartime horrors endured by...
One woman’s life serves as an exemplar of the harsh realities experienced by an Italian generation marked by war in this panoramic, yet site-specific, novel.
Maria Vittoria is a bride of advanced age—25—as Valmorbida (The Winding Stick, 2009, etc.) begins her story. In 1923, her father produces a groom for her, Achille, a World War I veteran, and the story of Maria’s life begins to unfold, along with the story of a family and a country devastated by competing loyalties and warring factions. Maria and Achille settle in the plains, in the village of Fosso, but the wisdom imparted to her by the emblematic Madonna of the Mountains, a statue of the Virgin Mary which Maria carries with her throughout her life, harkens back to the rough-hewn lessons and truths of her early life in the mountains of the north. As Maria and Achille nurture both their growing family and a thriving grocery business, the rising power of fascism and the cruel privations of World War II threaten to destroy all the couple has so doggedly worked to create. Valmorbida’s narrative raises issues of misogyny, family loyalty, and moral ambiguity during wartime in an organic way while maintaining the tension and characterization needed to advance a family saga. As the tale approaches a postwar finale, Maria must make peace with past decisions and, once again, depends on her companion since youth, the eponymous Madonna, for guidance.
Valmorbida belongs to a family that emigrated from Italy to Australia after World War II, and the wartime horrors endured by her characters may invite speculation about the autobiographical nature of this work—but the moral and ethical questions raised propel the story beyond the particulars into the universal.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59243-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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