Dealing in fiction with a subject of such moral and physical enormity requires a level of rigor and care not achieved in...
British newcomer Granville pits storytelling against the Holocaust in a pair of alternating narratives whose connection is obvious from the start.
When Dr. Josef Breuer’s description of the young woman found nearly dead on the grounds of an abandoned Viennese mental hospital includes mention of a shaved head and “a line of inked characters” on her left arm, we know that she is somehow a concentration camp survivor, even though the year is 1899. Lilie, as Josef calls her, has “come to find the monster”—and we know who that is, even before she asks Josef to take her to Linz because “the monster will be too big by the time he comes to Vienna.” It’s also clear in the narration of an unpleasant girl named Krysta that we have moved into the Third Reich years. Krysta lives on the outskirts of a camp where her Papa performs medical experiments on the inmates; it’s about as plausible that she would strike up a friendship with one of these “animal-people,” a boy named Daniel, as it is that she would suddenly be placed in the camp herself after her guilt-stricken father’s death. Readers are basically waiting to find out how someone from the 1940s appeared in fin de siècle Vienna, and those who paid attention to the novel’s prologue will figure it out long before the author’s explanation in the last five pages. Granville creates an appropriately dark atmosphere, from Josef’s distasteful attraction to the vulnerable Lilie to the gruesome fairy tales Krysta heard from their housekeeper, Greet, before she and Papa came to the “infirmary.” The author aspires to assert the power of imagination to help people cope with dire circumstances, but her setup is so blatant, her characters so predetermined, that her use of the Holocaust seems like a gimmick rather than a genuine effort to deepen our understanding.
Dealing in fiction with a subject of such moral and physical enormity requires a level of rigor and care not achieved in this overly pat novel.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59463-255-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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