A stirring reminder that the most beautiful moments can be frustratingly evanescent and that everyone needs to learn the...
A middle-aged man makes peace with his life choices in this novel.
Ben Alto was still in his prime when he first met Anne-Marie, an arresting native who completely swept him off his feet, in France. In the present, his marriage to Lee, a New York–based artist, is not without its challenges, beset as it is by the daily plod of domesticity. Ben has carved a life back home in the United States, quashing his hopes of becoming an artist and resorting to teaching art history and writing about painting instead. As he and Lee desperately try to start a family, Ben is haunted by his trajectory: “I had begun to age, and to mellow; I had begun to lose confidence in any sort of important future—as a painter or a critic—and although I tried not to be bitter, my lack of prominence weighed on me.” Eventually, Ben and Lee adopt little Misha and cobble together a life of middle-class plentitude with its attendant joys and disappointments. When a life-altering event shakes the couple out of their complacency, they decide they will travel to Europe again, revisiting their favorite places, including St.-Rémy-de-Provence. Reaching out to Anne-Marie during their visit, Ben finds that life has not been kind to her: she is struggling with a rebellious teenager, Celestine, and her love, Zach Douglas, is slowly losing his battle to cancer. Middle-aged ennui and long-lost loves are tropes that have frequently been mined before, but Misurella (Arrangement in Black and White, 2014, etc.) tinges the story with enough pathos and color to craft a standout. There is plenty of nuance in a narrative that could easily have slipped into melodrama but doesn’t. The gorgeous Provencal countryside—with its rippling lavender fields, quaint markets, and striking abbeys and churches—is rendered vividly; one can almost imagine the page as an artist’s canvas here. Impressionist and postimpressionist paintings of Provence come to mind, including those by Ben’s favorite artist, van Gogh. What emerges is a moving account of the necessary compromises people make in their lives.
A stirring reminder that the most beautiful moments can be frustratingly evanescent and that everyone needs to learn the delicate art of letting go.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5377-2111-8
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Blue Triangle
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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