Slovo risks melodrama, but on the whole her tale is smart and poignant, exploring some of the same moral territory as Nikita...
The adventures of Boris and Natasha. No, not that Boris and Natasha, but a pair equally in thrall to a shadowy leader, and without the laughter.
In this epic tale, sprawling in scope and ambition but with a smallish dramatis personae—a cleaning lady, a few Party functionaries and bureaucrats, an American fellow traveler, a young woman who resembles Pasternak’s sad Lara—Slovo (Red Dust, 2001, etc.) imagines life at the height of Stalin’s terror. Boris Ivanov lives in a time of signs and rumors, and he watches carefully as the promise of the Revolution is betrayed. Other figures here are less inclined to silence—one remarks to Boris, “Remember how we used to boast that ours would be the generation to change history? I always assumed we were talking about the historical future”—and less loyal to the boss, at least outwardly, but Boris falls under suspicion all the same, as everyone in Leningrad eventually does. Irina Davydovna has been out in the cold, a hand on an Arctic vessel that was useless for cutting through ice; just so, her protector, high-ranking official Sergei Kirov, is powerless to stop the death machine. He knows that his own time is coming: “Glorious Stalin,” he tells Irina, “magnanimous Stalin, is going to fit me with a new suit.” The years wheel by, and Boris’s daughter Natasha is caught in the crossfire of betrayal, denunciation and suspicion; by 1938, she is a ghost in the political machine, “not dead exactly—more like indifferent.” Matters should not improve for anyone when the Nazis attack Leningrad, laying the city to terrible siege, but Natasha, having endured so much, finds herself invested with a new will to live, with “such an alien feeling that she has to grope to find the word to describe it . . . Happy.”
Slovo risks melodrama, but on the whole her tale is smart and poignant, exploring some of the same moral territory as Nikita Mikhalkov’s film Burnt by the Sun. A big idea well handled.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-32720-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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