A luminous, self-contained, fluid world in which history, legend, and a religious quest create a portrait of an age—the glittering high noon of the Manchurian empire. Myths come down to earth, gods appear as fortune-tellers, and ghosts, lascivious and maternal, intervene in mortal lives as Larsen (Bronze Mirror, 1991; Silk Road, 1989) turns to the Manchus, under whom China reached its imperial zenith. The time is the mid- 18th century: Westerners are curious about the country but are still rare, the Emperor is strong, his subjects are loyal, and great palaces of delicate beauty have been built for his pleasure. But the material world, however brilliant, is for believers an illusion, a distraction from the spiritual journey that is the true purpose of life, and Lotus, a wonderfully original protagonist, will eventually be driven to seek enlightenment—an enlightenment that will come only when a number of scattered sacred statues are once more united to form a mandala, revealing the mythical ``hidden pure land'' where there is no suffering. As Lotus, still grieving for her dead mother, grows old enough to become a servant of the Dowager Empress in the Forbidden City, legends, poems, histories, and the memoirs of a British opium addict and a 1930s aviatrix further illuminate the myth and the period. Lotus, a Manchu bondservant like her courtier father, has been prepared by her father's concubine for life at court, where beauty and talent may lead to marriage with a prince. And once there, accomplished and strikingly beautiful, she is soon wooed by one, but cryptic comments from mysterious messengers and hauntingly vivid dreams impel her to search for the statues and restore the mandala instead. An exemplary novelist again makes history a playful parade of personalities, period details, and ordinary people conscripted by the times.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-1111-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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