An elegant, multifaceted discourse on narrative, God and free will, and where the three occasionally meet.
Diski continues her examination of Old Testament figures (she began with Abraham and Sarah in Only Human, 2001), focusing this time on Isaac and Jacob.
Eschewing the costume melodrama of much historical fiction, Diski instead pares down the biblical stories to their emotional, universal core. Beginning with Isaac, she creates a portrait of a hollow man, forever traumatized by a brush with death. Abraham’s planned sacrifice of Isaac is one of the great teaching tales of the Bible, but here it’s flipped on its side as we get the boy’s terrified perspective. Isaac climbs the mountain with his father in a kind of stupor, knowing Abraham plans to kill him. Emotionally, if not physically dead after the event, Isaac grows into a shattered man: fearful, hypochondriacal, cruel to his wife—in short, nothing like his brave half-brother Ishmael, banished but better in every way. Isaac’s own sons, Esau and Jacob, are similar to Isaac and Ishmael. The favorite, Esau, is dull and crude, while Jacob, small and mollycoddled, proves clever and ambitious. Jacob deceives his brother and, upon doing so, flees, fearing revenge. He travels to his mother’s people and meets the beautiful, haughty Rachel. Jacob strikes a deal and, after seven years of labor, wins Rachel’s hand, but it is her plain, older sister, Leah, he’s tricked into marrying. Eventually he marries Rachel, too, and thereafter the two wives make his life miserable. He loves Rachel to distraction but it is only the despised Leah who bears him sons. Finally, Rachel gives birth to Joseph and, as before, the less worthy son becomes the best loved.
An elegant, multifaceted discourse on narrative, God and free will, and where the three occasionally meet.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-84408-015-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Virago/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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