Readable, sometimes-insightful fiction about the conflict between duty and religion.
Blanton’s (A God Who Believes in Me, 2014, etc.) historical novel follows a German Protestant man from his student days to his command of a Nazi U-boat.
Luther Weitgucker, a boy from a middle-class Lutheran family, is raised in Dresden, Germany, during the interwar years. Although he’s not devoutly religious, he’s firmly rooted in his Christian upbringing and deeply inspired by the Beatitudes. An ambitious young man, he’s also heavily involved in academics and sports. He goes away to college in Bonn where, after a few youthful adventures with women and alcohol, he buckles down and receives a medical degree. Although Luther is opposed to Nazism on ethical and religious grounds, his primary focus is his own future, so he does his best to ignore the growing fascist movement. But when his private medical practice proves insufficient to support his wife and three young sons in the economic and political climate of the late 1930s, he joins the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, and becomes a U-boat officer. The sections that focus on Luther’s personal life ably render the details of his experiences and development, but they often awkwardly toss in historical context using simplistic expository passages. Likewise, Luther’s positive interactions with various token characters, including a disabled neighbor, a Jewish friend, a gay friend, and a Roma lover, display a lack of nuance. However, Blanton does a stronger job of showing how even “good Germans” who weren’t pro-Nazi still contributed to Nazism with their complacency. For example, Luther and his young bride move into their first home as a married couple after their fathers purchase the house cheaply from fleeing Jewish neighbors. At another point, Luther finds himself saying to his wife: “Maybe the Nazis won’t be as bad as we first feared.” As the war progresses, however, Luther’s official duties and growing personal faith—influenced by the contemporary dissident and Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer—increasingly come into conflict. It is this personal spiritual journey, more than the portrayal of history, that will connect with readers, making this ultimately a novel about personal faith.
Readable, sometimes-insightful fiction about the conflict between duty and religion.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0561-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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