A pleasing literary fancy set against the terrors of the French Revolution.
An adventuresome debut novel starring William Wordsworth’s true-life mistress recast as a heroine during the Reign of Terror.
Tipton creates a life of intrigue for Annette Vallon, present as a mere footnote in literary history, known primarily as the mother of Wordsworth’s illegitimate daughter Caroline. Raised as a member of the upper bourgeoisie, Annette lived a life of privilege until the Revolution. Annette meets Wordsworth at a fête, where the young poet has been introduced into society to help improve his French. Having walked about the continent, Wordsworth has remained in France to support the noble revolution, though too soon its ideals become compromised by the paranoia of the new republic, and an Englishman is now viewed with suspicion. Nevertheless, Wordsworth and Annette begin an affair built around poetry and a mutual love of the wilds of nature, but soon enough it becomes too dangerous for Wordsworth to stay in France (his friends and associates are outraged by the increasing excesses of Robespierre’s government and are soon targeted). By now Annette is pregnant and staying with her older sister, uneasy about Wordsworth’s dangerous journey back to England but secure that their love is genuine (they perform their own impromptu riverside marriage vows). Caroline is born; Wordsworth is gone; and Annette must move out of the family house into a modest cottage, where Annette’s real adventure begins. Soon she is hiding those in danger of being subjected to the brutality of the revolution, freeing prisoners from jail during the Reign of Terror, performing feats so courageous she becomes a virtual folk hero, known as the Mother of Orleans. Wordsworth finally returns ten years later, but to tell Annette of his impending marriage to an Englishwoman. The romance of the novel is secondary to Tipton’s portrait of Annette as a spirited heroine in a time of desperation and danger. Though the number of great escapes she’s involved in begins to veer into implausibility, Tipton is able to balance the action with the history.
A pleasing literary fancy set against the terrors of the French Revolution.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-082221-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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