Nagy mixes narrative modes and tones (and generations) nimbly; it's rare to see suspense and literary lyricism woven...
An unusual and compelling debut: a vast, ambitious intergenerational family saga that takes place in a brief time frame (three days) and a remote setting.
That would be Seven Island, off Maine's rugged coast, and for nearly two centuries (the novel takes place in 1964, mid–Cold War) the playground for two wealthy families, the Hillsingers and the Quicks, who are deeply entwined yet insist on—revel in—their separateness, living in the island's two grand houses and "mingl[ing] when necessary or appropriate, but rarely with any warmth." Connections have become even more strained and Byzantine in the current generation: Jim Hillsinger and Billy Quick married socialite sisters, so their children are cousins, and, after Billy's wife Hannah's death four years earlier, Lila Hillsinger temporarily took a more intimate role in the lives of her nieces and her brother-in-law. The immediate occasion is "the Migration," the annual summer departure of the sheep of Seven for a neighboring island and its vaunted clover, an event around which elaborate ceremonies have developed. The plot Nagy builds onto this is flabbergastingly complex and fascinating: Jim is a CIA officer recently cashiered because he was suspected of treason...a suspicion that emerged from his efforts to save his sister-in-law, briefly a communist fellow traveler, from public humiliation in the McCarthyite heyday. Meanwhile there's a gorgeous subplot that has to do with Hillsinger's decision (he's egged on by his aged father, one of several indelibly drawn minor characters) to banish his 12-year-old son, Catta, to wild, impassable Baffin Island for a 24-hour period—a brutal rite of passage that Lila has forbidden. The cast is huge, the plot sometimes diffuse, the transitions a bit whipsawing, and there's a small false note at the end...but mostly this novel is a surprising delight.
Nagy mixes narrative modes and tones (and generations) nimbly; it's rare to see suspense and literary lyricism woven together so well.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-841-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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
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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