A brief, powerful historical novel that reflects on the beauty and brutality of life in wartime.
In this gripping novel, Paul (Nothing is Strange with You, 2008) chronicles bloody Civil War battles fought by the 95th Pennsylvania regiment.
As the novel opens in May 1864, the 95th Pennsylvania Volunteers have dwindled from the infamous “Original Twenty-Five” to just 12. These young men, encamped in Virginia, introduce themselves in an opening sequence that relies on formulaic descriptions (“a twenty-two-year-old typesetter and aspiring journalist from Philadelphia”) but benefits from rollicking dialogue (“Oh, I’ll tell you about it soon.” “When? When we’re all dead and buried?”). Although Paul includes real-life historical figures in the story, such as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, he invented these dozen major characters. As the soldiers each discuss heroism and self-abnegation, they develop distinctive personalities. Their tone is often one of philosophical resignation—when “[g]ood men get killed every day,” “it ain’t always important whether you live or die,” one insists—but some soldiers are also devout religious believers, praying for God’s mercy for themselves and the Confederates. Paul effectively recreates the atmosphere of wearisome marches and gory warfare, and his combat scenes are matter-of-fact and graphic: There are gunshot and bayonet wounds but also crushed testicles and teeth-torn throats—as well as an unexpected erection in a scene of uncomfortably sexualized violence. The narrative often shifts to a single character’s perspective, only to have him suddenly shot to death. Such unsentimental bluntness, however, contrasts with Paul’s overall concern for his characters’ psychological back stories; Abbot, for instance, longs to join an English theater troupe, while Greisler is terrified of fire. The novel’s finest chapter details a wounded soldier’s struggle to escape an eerie forest and rejoin the company, and it balances irony and tragedy perfectly, juxtaposing tender flashbacks of the soldier’s prewar life against the blood-soaked present. As the novel concludes, with just a “quartet of survivors” remaining to parade through Philadelphia, the sadness is tempered by the prospect of new life ahead: “[Babcock] resumed walking forward—or backward—or sideways, or up and down—into what looked like the future.” Paul’s canvas may be limited in this novel, but his talent could easily sustain future works of epic historical fiction.
A brief, powerful historical novel that reflects on the beauty and brutality of life in wartime.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4936-9582-9
Page Count: 164
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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