Johan Thoms was born in 1894 with a remarkably large head, and by age 9 he had humiliated an irascible grandmaster in chess. When this brilliant boy left his Bosnian village for the University of Sarajevo, he made a mistake that may have precipitated World War I.
In Thornton’s debut novel, the "overeager, impatient, and optimistic" (and fictional) Thoms is inserted into history as the chauffeur who innocently pilots Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, to their assassination in 1914. A sparkling student, when he gets to college he makes friends and begins a love affair with Lorelei Ribeiro, whose husband had "found a watery grave with the Titanic the previous year." Then his schoolteacher father descends into a mad obsession with Pythagoras and the boy must find work. He becomes an occasional driver for Oskar Pitiorek, an Austrian general based in Sarajevo, and the die is cast. After Franz Ferdinand's death, a guilt-mad Thoms rescues Cicero, a dying orphan; wanders to Portugal’s Lands End; meets Hemingway, Orwell, and Dorothy Parker during the Spanish Civil War; anonymously writes successful novels about "The White Kilted Brigadier"; and eventually grows into "an exquisite old man" seeking a "wormhole in the space-time continuum." Thornton’s arcane references and wordplay dazzle—Thoms’ "slow foreplay with the books" of the Kama Sutra, for instance—and his voice has echoes of Gabriel García Márquez (sans magical realism).
Chaos theory as erudite fiction: a bleak yet comic odyssey exploring and expiating human frailties. Read it slowly and savor it.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-755149-1
Page Count: 300
Publisher: The Friday Project
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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In this follow-up to the widely read The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018), a young concentration camp survivor is sentenced to 15 years’ hard labor in a Russian gulag.
The novel begins with the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops in 1945. In the camp, 16-year-old Cecilia "Cilka" Klein—one of the Jewish prisoners introduced in Tattooist—was forced to become the mistress of two Nazi commandants. The Russians accuse her of collaborating—they also think she might be a spy—and send her to the Vorkuta Gulag in Siberia. There, another nightmarish scenario unfolds: Cilka, now 18, and the other women in her hut are routinely raped at night by criminal-class prisoners with special “privileges”; by day, the near-starving women haul coal from the local mines in frigid weather. The narrative is intercut with Cilka’s grim memories of Auschwitz as well as her happier recollections of life with her parents and sister before the war. At Vorkuta, her lot improves when she starts work as a nurse trainee at the camp hospital under the supervision of a sympathetic woman doctor who tries to protect her. Cilka also begins to feel the stirrings of romantic love for Alexandr, a fellow prisoner. Though believing she is cursed, Cilka shows great courage and fortitude throughout: Indeed, her ability to endure trauma—as well her heroism in ministering to the sick and wounded—almost defies credulity. The novel is ostensibly based on a true story, but a central element in the book—Cilka’s sexual relationship with the SS officers—has been challenged by the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center and by the real Cilka’s stepson, who says it is false. As in Tattooist, the writing itself is workmanlike at best and often overwrought.
Though gripping, even moving at times, the novel doesn’t do justice to the solemn history from which it is drawn.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-26570-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
Some very nice, very smart African-Americans are plunged into netherworlds of malevolent sorcery in the waning days of Jim Crow—as if Jim Crow alone wasn’t enough of a curse to begin with.
In the northern U.S. of the mid-1950s, as depicted in this merrily macabre pastiche by Ruff (The Mirage, 2012, etc.), Driving While Black is an even more perilous proposition than it is now. Ask Atticus Turner, an African-American Korean War veteran and science-fiction buff, who is compelled to face an all-too-customary gauntlet of racist highway patrolmen and hostile white roadside hamlets en route from his South Side Chicago home to a remote Massachusetts village in search of his curmudgeonly father, Montrose, who was lured away by a young white “sharp dresser” driving a silver Cadillac with tinted windows. At least Atticus isn’t alone; his uncle George, who puts out annual editions of The Safe Negro Travel Guide, is splitting driving duties in his Packard station wagon “with inlaid birch trim and side paneling.” Also along for the ride is Atticus’ childhood friend Letitia Dandridge, another sci-fi fan, whose family lived in the same neighborhood as the Turners. It turns out this road trip is merely the beginning of a series of bizarre chimerical adventures ensnaring both the Turner and Dandridge clans in ancient rituals, arcane magical texts, alternate universes, and transmogrifying potions, all of which bears some resemblance to the supernatural visions of H.P. Lovecraft and other gothic dream makers of the past. Ruff’s ripping yarns often pile on contrivances and overextend the narratives in the grand manner of pulp storytelling, but the reinvented mythos here seems to have aroused in him a newfound empathy and engagement with his characters.
If nothing else, you have to giggle over how this novel’s namesake, who held vicious white supremacist opinions, must be doing triple axels in his grave at the way his imagination has been so impudently shaken and stirred.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-229206-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Categories: GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | HISTORICAL FICTION | FANTASY | HISTORICAL FANTASY
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