Bitter, beautiful, profound—like Mahler in its intensity.
Forced by the SS to give concerts at the camps, a violinist agonizes: Can music really tame the savage beast? Or, more to the point, revive the living dead?
Gottfried Keller is wracked with doubts. Will playing for walking skeletons ease or mock their suffering? Is he helping them or only saving his skin? Co-founder of the Emerson String Quartet, Drucker debuts with a novel loosely based on his father’s life. Here’s moral dilemma writ large. Sprung from a hospital where he’d distracted Werhmacht casualties, Keller confronts a Kommandant who, looking up from his Goethe, shanghais the fiddler into a scientific experiment. The Reich’s Social Darwinists want to see how music affects their victims. And not any music, but Bach, Beethoven and especially those composers deemed by the Fuhrer degenerate—Bartok, Hindemith, Berg. Already guilty of cowardice for abandoning his Jewish lover when she’d fled to Palestine, Keller is gripped in his prison bunk by nightmares and feels guilty, too, for befriending Rudi, a guard cultured enough to tell a fugue from a partita, but still a monster. At first, Keller’s audience of the doomed seems deaf to his virtuosic bow-work; they’re slapped, then, into applause by the Kommandant. In time, they begin to respond—one prisoner damning Keller for coming, with memory and magic, into their hell-hole, another begging him to stay. Mainly, however, horrifically they moan, a chorus of longing, rage, despair. And, as the funeral march drags on, Keller must contend with the Kommandant’s taunting accusation: Isn’t the violinist complicit in torture, isn’t he a demon Orpheus secretly enthralled by his own power?
Bitter, beautiful, profound—like Mahler in its intensity.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4329-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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