Familiar turf for Norman’s longtime readers, but he still has a knack for finding emotional resonances in muted, unlikely...
A young couple adjusts to life in a rural Vermont farmhouse and the specter of the novelist who once lived there.
Norman’s fiction (My Darling Detective, 2017, etc.) is death-stalked stuff: His novels are suffused with the ghosts of spouses and parents, murders around hotels and lighthouses, and downcast observations of the somber, foggy Northeast. Though nobody would confuse him for a horror writer, he has a keen eye for the way loss uneasily sticks with those left behind. This time he lets the dead do the talking. Simon, the narrator, is a novelist who died of a heart attack on a ferry in Nova Scotia and who’s returned to his home in Vermont to observe its new occupants: Zachary, a private detective, and Muriel, a scholar of Japanese poetry. The two are suspicious of a strange presence; the alarm in their library keeps getting set off, a book by Wallace Stevens (that most metaphysical of modern poets) can’t stay in one place, and the home’s deed has a “ghost clause” that obligates the prior owner to buy back the home in case of a “malevolent presence.” But the home is stressed enough already, as Zachary works on the case of a missing girl that’s torn up the town and sends him down a series of false leads. This isn’t a plot so much as a kind of atmosphere; Simon observes frustrations, losses, and elisions, from miscarriages to missed leads to his widow, Lorca, deep in mourning. Yet, like the poet Muriel studies, who tucks erotic parentheticals into her mordant poems, a little light slips into the story, resolving both the case of the missing girl and Simon’s uneasy sense of place. What opens as a ghost story turns out to be something of a love story instead.
Familiar turf for Norman’s longtime readers, but he still has a knack for finding emotional resonances in muted, unlikely scenarios.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-544-98729-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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