Oblique, extraordinarily ambitious attempt to articulate the unspeakable.
Published in Germany in 1962, this difficult, neglected Holocaust novel is the first work by Adler (1910–88) to be translated into English.
A secular Jew from Prague, a camp survivor who wrote in German, the author refused to be categorized in his 26 books, which included fiction, poetry, philosophy and history. The same bold unconventionality is evident in this unusual novel, which begins with roundups in the fictional town of Stupart, Germany. Messengers deliver a printed message: “Thou shalt not dwell among us!” The arrested people, for whom everything is now “forbidden,” are taken on trains to Leitenberg, a way station, before being shipped to Ruhenthal—modeled on the slave community of Theresienstadt, where Adler spent two and a half years, according to translator Filkins’s excellent introduction. Their trajectory is obscured and muddied by narrative shifts, time loops, feints, euphemisms, contradictions and ventures into the surreal. Irony is pervasive. There are no references to Jews or Nazis. Instead there are the powerful, the powerless and the bystanders, all caught up in this “epidemic of mental illness.” The occasional use of words like crematorium and extermination startles like a gunshot. Intermittently discernible through the fog of mass murder is the Lustig family. Leopold Lustig, a 75-year-old doctor, is driven out of Stupart with his wife Caroline, sister-in-law Ida and grown children Zerlina and Paul. All are sketchily characterized—after all, they are “ghosts,” more numbers than names. Leopold dies from starvation. Zerlina, by now a hybrid rabbit/woman, is allowed an impassioned swan song before being consumed by flames (or people, take your pick). Paul is the only survivor. In the final third, the novel settles into an orderly progression with a consistent viewpoint: Paul’s. His efforts to get help for the sick survivors are dismissed by the American liberators, acerbically portrayed by Adler. Paul’s one minor triumph is to get his name back, on new ID.
Oblique, extraordinarily ambitious attempt to articulate the unspeakable.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6673-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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