Anyone with even the mildest interest in clothing will enjoy this knowledgeable, readable account of a pivotal year in haute...
A young woman from the French provinces watches Chanel reinvent high fashion in an enjoyable second novel from Diliberto (I Am Madame X, 2003, etc.).
In early 1919, orphaned Isabelle Varlet leaves her hometown of Agen and travels to Paris, armed with a letter of introduction to Chanel from a local dressmaker praising her skill with a needle. “When I started work at Chanel Modes et Coutures, I joined a revolution,” Isabelle says. Women are cutting their hair and showing their ankles; Chanel’s sleek, unstructured clothes have the simplicity and ease they want. Lovingly detailed descriptions of the painstaking draping, cutting and hand-sewing that goes into each couture creation are more interesting than Isabelle’s personal life, which involves a not-terribly-exciting romance with a one-legged war veteran and some ferocious passes by wolfish male couturiers. Happily, most of the plot centers on rivalries within and outside of the Chanel workshop. Isabelle rises quickly to the rank of première (head seamstress and virtually an associate designer), but her position is threatened by a jealous coworker and the theft of her group’s toiles (master patterns) just before the all-important August 1919 unveiling of the collection with which Chanel hopes to cement her reputation as France’s greatest fashion designer. By far the most vivid character is Mademoiselle, as her employees call Chanel: imperious, capricious, utterly dedicated to her art yet also a shrewd businesswoman, a proto-feminist who tells Isabelle, “work and independence are what keep women young and attractive.” Around her swarm jealous rivals like Jean Patou, scheming subordinates and impossible clients, whose every arbitrary demand she expects her overworked staff to fulfill. Isabelle is nowhere near as colorful, but she’s a good observer who holds back the dressing-room curtains so readers can enjoy an insider’s peek at this rarified world.
Anyone with even the mildest interest in clothing will enjoy this knowledgeable, readable account of a pivotal year in haute couture.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8065-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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