An elegant account, told with clarity and grace: van Straten’s history has a limited scope but should strike a chord with...
A fictionalized family history traces the fortunes of the ancestors of Italian novelist van Straten from Rotterdam in 1811 to the present day.
In the early-19th century, the Jews across Europe began to be integrated into the mainstream of society, in a gradual and halting process that alleviated many old injustices but also gave rise to some new ones. The narrator (named Giorgio van Straten) is an Italian art restorer who begins the saga with his great-great-grandfather Hartog’s choice of a family name in 1811 (when Napoleon decreed that Jews were henceforth citizens and had to be officially registered as such). A cucumber seller and father of five in Rotterdam, Hartog sees little to be gained from his new status, but he dutifully registers himself as Hartog van Straaten (Henry of the Street) and goes about his business as before. Over the next two centuries, the van Stratens (the second “a” was lost when Giorgio’s grandfather moved to Genoa in 1913) step carefully through history in a larger world that encompasses wars, revolutions, and massacres, as well as the smaller family dramas of marriages, births, and emigration. Hartog’s grandson Benjamin, for example, quarrels with his father Emanuel and runs away to sea, ending up in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. Benjamin’s nephew George, on the other hand, applies himself so dutifully to his work as an insurance agent that he is sent to Italy to manage a new branch of his company. We learn the history of how George’s boss Henry Goldstuck rose from obscure beginnings in Latvia to become an international tycoon. George’s nephew in Russia gets himself into trouble with the NKVD, and nearly everyone in the family has to scramble to escape the Nazis. The story ends with the death of the author’s father, but like all family sagas it is primarily an account of the generations the narrator never knew in his own lifetime.
An elegant account, told with clarity and grace: van Straten’s history has a limited scope but should strike a chord with amateur genealogists everywhere.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58642-071-2
Page Count: 285
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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