by Elizabeth Hickey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2005
Lovely, if a little ornate—rather like Klimt’s work, in other words.
A graceful imagining of the joined lives of a rising, soon-to-be-famous artist and a young woman in fin-de-siècle Vienna.
At the beginning of art historian Hickey’s evocative debut novel, an old woman reflects on the madeleines she has brought to the mountains of Austria ahead of the advancing Red Army: “This was all I could bring from Vienna, Gustav’s drawings. He never thought much of them or took them seriously as art, they were preparatory, explanatory, they were plans, blueprints, mistakes.” In the fire of WWII they may also be the only things to survive of Gustav Klimt’s work, he himself having been dead and nearly forgotten for a generation. Hickey then turns the tale back to Emilie Floege’s girlhood, as her bourgeois father hires Klimt to paint a portrait of his daughter. Fast forward a few years, and, shades of Girl with a Pearl Earring, artist takes an interest in model as more than a vehicle for art, whereupon, Emilie recalls, “Gently he prised my lips apart and put his tongue inside.” By some accounts, the real Emilie was 12 when this happened, but Hickey wisely steers from treacherous shoals in this censorious time and assigns Emilie the age of 16 or 17. There’s little of prurient interest in these pages, though; Hickey is instead concerned to show Klimt’s influence on the young woman as a thinker and an artist, and soon Emilie has blossomed into a designer of local renown who is now a familiar in Viennese art circles, where much more scandalous things are always happening. Klimt’s relationship with Emilie—which inspired his famed painting The Kiss—is of profound importance to both, and Hickey treats it with care: as she writes, borrowing a page from real life, Klimt’s last word was his lover’s name, while years later, as Vienna burns, Emilie finds herself hoping against hope that some of the world she and Gustav knew will survive, though, she remarks, “I can realign myself to exist without certain works of art.”
Lovely, if a little ornate—rather like Klimt’s work, in other words.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-9260-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
BOOK REVIEW
by Roy Jacobsen translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
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by Roy Jacobsen & translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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