Alsina’s debut novel, translated from the Catalan, is an unusual historical saga that touches on the Holocaust, the Spanish Civil War, deconstructionism, kidney transplantation and 1960s sexual liberation.
As the novel opens in 1932, Samuel Klein, a Freudian psychoanalyst in Berlin, and his fiancée, American pianist Ruth, face exile as Jews. Rather than exploring this dramatic pre-Holocaust situation in depth, however, the narrative quickly skips to 1963. Samuel and Ruth’s daughter, Sarah, is a recent University of California, Berkeley, graduate who’s passionate about political activism and feminism. She travels to France to study philosophy under Jacques Derrida. Samuel asks Sarah to meet with Armand Roare, the son of a Catalan doctor who saved his life in 1940; Armand is heading to Paris from Barcelona, to complete a nephrology residency. Over jazz concerts, Sarah and Armand grow closer, and through meetings with Samuel’s wartime colleagues, they uncover stories of his exploits. While a refugee, Samuel spied for the British, reporting on Nazi activity and leading Jews to safety through Spain. Professional ambitions lead Sarah and Armand in different directions, as he performs Barcelona’s first kidney transplant and she takes Derrida’s theories to the United States, but a hurried last section gives the lovers one final, bittersweet rendezvous. The author’s scenes of World War II and the Spanish Civil War provide a vibrant backdrop to its middle flashback section. However, long passages of redundant historical detail seem shoehorned in. The book’s political commentary is also rather shallow (“We Jews want to flee from our cages”; “[w]ars are always cruel for the vast majority of the population in all countries”). Unfortunately, the novel’s characterizations sometimes fail to rise above stereotypes (“He tended to gesticulate when he spoke, as people from the Mediterranean do”), and its explicit sex scenes, though convincing, are sometimes overwritten (“Lustfully, he felt himself immersed in a liberating burst”). Throughout the novel, characters’ backgrounds are often forced into dialogue: “Before going to Paris…we’d like to hear about your life experiences.” Ultimately, even the 1960s framing device seems unnecessary; the best portions of the book recreate wartime action, and they might have been expanded to fill a whole novel.
A novel that features an intriguing blend of topics, hampered by awkward execution.Pub Date: May 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496168948
Page Count: 340
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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SEEN & HEARD
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Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
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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
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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