Though the poet discovers plenty about love, friendship, and art in his quest, this novel is mainly slapstick, played for...
Historical farce that pits a middling London poet against a very gentlemanly Devil.
The foppish, fatuous poet is the narrator of this debut novel, and the title character is his foil, though the Devil turns out to be less of a presence than either the title or the setup would seem to promise. At the outset, Lionel Savage, a poet of some following but little literary distinction, discovers that he is all but broke. When the butler who raised him informs him of this, he responds, “Nonsense, Simmons. I don’t buy anything except books. You cannot possibly tell me I’ve squandered my fortune upon books.” Alas, he has, and he must remedy his situation quickly in order to continue to circulate in the high society to which he has become accustomed. It’s his good fortune—or is it?—to find himself matched with a beautiful heiress whose family apparently wants her to marry a poet, and he’s apparently as good as any. Yet six months after the nuptials, he has yet to consummate the marriage, share more than a few words with his bride, or write an acceptable poem since their courtship. “If you have ever written, you will know that it is either an arduous business or a simple one, but rarely in between,” he explains. “For me it used to be the one but is now the other.” At one of the society parties his wife throws to ease her frustrations, he encounters the gentleman of the title, explains his dilemma, and lends the Devil a book. That very night, his wife disappears. What follows encompasses his adventurously wanton sister, his wife’s famous explorer brother, an inventor suspected of treason, a wise bookseller, and the aforementioned butler, all of whom are attempting to answer two questions: did the narrator make a bargain with the Devil to take his wife? If so, how can he get her back?
Though the poet discovers plenty about love, friendship, and art in his quest, this novel is mainly slapstick, played for laughs.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-56263-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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