Unabashedly in the tradition of Hugo: an old-fashioned narrative that builds up a head of steam quickly and has plentiful...
French Vautrin, 1989winner of the Prix Goncourt, debuts here with a sweeping epic tale of Paris under the 1871 Commune.
After France’s disastrous 1870 war with Prussia, the Second Empire collapsed into civil war and insurrection. Chaos reigned in Paris, where bloody riots were suppressed only after a yearlong siege. Our primary guide through this tempest is Horace Grondin, deputy head of the Imperial Sûreté. Known for his unimpeachable probity, Horace hides a dark secret: He was once a convict himself, sent to Devil’s Island 16 years earlier on charges of murder (they were false). After escaping, he assumed a new identity and entered the Sûreté partly as a way of tracking down Antoine Tarpagnan, whom he believed to have been the true killer. Antoine had become a captain in the National Guard during the intervening years, but with the fall of the Empire he went over to the Communards, who had declared Paris a Free Republic and organized the defense of the city against royalist and Prussian armies. The day the Commune was proclaimed, Antoine met and fell in love with Gabriella Pucci, a back-alley prostitute “owned” by the vicious pimp Edmond Trocard. Gabriella loves Antoine but is heavily in debt to Trocard, who refuses to let her go and threatens to kill Antoine if he comes near her. As Antoine searches through the Paris underworld for Gabriella, he is himself pursued by Horace, who’s using his own informers to find the captain. It’s a risky investigation, however, for policemen were not well liked by the Communards, and Horace is in danger of lynching by the mob if he’s recognized. With three armies encircling Paris and firing squads executing hundreds each day, the odds are short that Horace, Antoine, and Gabriella will all make it out alive.
Unabashedly in the tradition of Hugo: an old-fashioned narrative that builds up a head of steam quickly and has plentiful enough action to make up for the thinness of its leading players.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-86159-174-8
Page Count: 481
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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