The subject of Cowan's (Messengers of the Gods, 1993, etc.) first novel—the thoughts of an intellectually adventurous Renaissance cartographer—should make it soar, but instead it remains painfully inert. Fra Mauro is a Venetian monk who never leaves his cell yet wants to create the greatest map of the world. Is this folly, or is he as well equipped as anyone—since mightn't ``the world [be...] a place entirely constructed from thought''? Mauro tests his hypothesis by receiving men who have traveled widely and come to him with their tales—a merchant who has seen the Orient, another who has been among the Mongols, others with tales of one-eyed and one-armed humans, or one-legged people, or collectors of heads and eaters of their own flesh. That the mind may create the world as much as vice versa is an idea equally at home in the Renaissance world of Hamlet and in the age of Picasso—but Cowan's tale brings it forward on feet of lead and too often with prose to match (``The more I translated his words, the more I began to believe that neither of us had a hegemony over truth''). Fra Mauro's visitors, and the good monk himself, remain underdetailed and dimensionless as an essay-like tone presides over dramatic near-inertia (``It dawned on me then that the world had to be considered as an elaborate artifice . . .''). ``What these men bring to me . . . is a feeling of awe,'' Mauro says at one point, making the reader only regret being unable to feel the same. Near books's end, as Mauro actually sits down to draw his map, Cowan produces a handful of pages as brightly filled with a wealth of life as Homer's description of Achilles' shield—but these are a small number among the gray many. A potential feast for thought, but in a novelistic equivalent of talking heads.
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1996
ISBN: 1-57062-196-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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