The historical context will be unfamiliar to most readers, but the issues, of good and evil, identity and fate, are...
A historical novel set in 1850 depicts a year in Bosnia under the rule of a despotic general and his occupying army, along with his obsequious and devious court.
The politically active Andric (The Days of the Consuls, 1992, etc.) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, the only laureate from what was then Yugoslavia. This historical novel was his final book before he died in 1975, and this is its first English translation. The grim narrative leaves little room for light and none for humor, as it describes Bosnia during this volatile year as “on the surface, rebellion, violence and fear, and beneath it age-old poverty, the meager existence of the small man and the quiet, unstoppable decay of institutions and families, of everything that had been or was held to be reputable, powerful and rich.” Into this breach, the occupying forces brought a moral cesspool and insidious gossip, while Omer Pasha Latas ruled from an inscrutable, imperious remove, as if he were above it all. For he has his own secrets and identity issues, as a Serbian Christian refugee from Bosnia (born Mihailo Latas) who had converted to Islam and established himself as a ruthless leader within the Ottoman Empire under the sultan in Istanbul. His identity, beliefs, and allegiances all have a certain malleability, as he returns to Bosnia not in the spirit of homecoming but as an outside enforcer, determined to quell any rebellion in the land where he once lived. Amid the portrayals of various members of the court, the novel’s centerpiece finds the protagonist sitting for a commissioned portrait and shows how his relationship with the painter changes both of them. The plot pivots on a senseless crime of passion, a surprising yet fitting denouement within a court marked by what one character calls “killing and lechery! Because everything in this house is infected with foul, profane lechery...and lechery kills, it must kill, for it’s the same as death, unnatural, shameful death.”
The historical context will be unfamiliar to most readers, but the issues, of good and evil, identity and fate, are universal.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-252-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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