An empathetic revisiting of horrific history rendered less conventional for a Holocaust novel by its unusual setting.
Even after escaping the horrors of Nazi-occupied Austria, a creative young girl continues to be tested as she struggles to make a new life in Bolivia.
Orly Zingel, born in 1928 to musical Jewish parents living in Vienna, has grown up happy and comfortable. She has a best friend, a make-believe world, and a beloved extended family, but all these will quickly be lost to her in 1938, when the Germans take over Austria and swiftly begin persecuting its Jews. Her father, a viola player in the Vienna Philharmonic, loses his job, and her opera-singer mother will soon find it impossible to make music too; and then the family is forced from their home into a cramped, overcrowded apartment. Steil (The Ambassador’s Wife, 2013, etc.) traces this all-too-familiar descent a little too sweetly in the scene-setting opening chapters but then with mounting intensity as Orly’s innocence is replaced by loss, shame, and terror. Fortunately, and after much effort, the Zingels secure visas to leave Austria, but their destination, La Paz in Bolivia, presents an immense culture shock which only Orly seems able to embrace. Befriending locals, she begins to learn both Spanish and Indian languages and delights in the country’s music and myths. Steil traces the extreme challenges faced by the immigrants, both initially and after the war ends, with commitment but excessive length. As the extent of the Holocaust becomes known, the survivors must deal not only with their own losses, but also the sight of Nazis settling in Bolivia, too. Grief, vengeance, and elements of restoration wind through Orly’s coming to terms with the past and her future, an important and touching journey though one that is diffused by its indulgent pacing.
An empathetic revisiting of horrific history rendered less conventional for a Holocaust novel by its unusual setting.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56181-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
PROFILES
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
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