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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.
Violent, often surrealistic Wild West yarn, Cormac McCarthy by way of Gabriel García Márquez.
Håkan Söderström is a force of nature, a wild giant whose name, in the frontier America in which he has landed, is rendered as the Hawk. On the docks back in Gothenburg he was separated from his brother, Linus, and he has sworn to find him in a land so big he can scarcely comprehend it. The Hawk lands in California and ventures eastward only to find himself in all kinds of odd company—crooks, con men, prophets, and the rare honest man—and a tide of history that keeps pushing him back to the west. Along the way, his exploits, literary scholar Diaz (Hispanic Institute/Columbia Univ.; Borges, Between History and Eternity, 2012) writes, are so numerous that he has become a legend in a frontier full of them; for one thing, says an awe-struck traveler, “He was offered his own territory by the Union, like a state, with his own laws and all. Just to keep him away.” The Hawk protests that most of what has been said about him is untrue—but not all of it. As Diaz, who delights in playful language, lists, and stream-of-consciousness prose, reconstructs his adventures, he evokes the multicultural nature of westward expansion, in which immigrants did the bulk of the hard labor and suffered the gravest dangers. One fine set piece is a version of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which religious fanatics dressed as Indians attack a pioneer party—save that in Diaz’s version, Håkan tears his way across the enemy force with a righteous fury befitting an avenging angel. “He knew he had killed and maimed several men,” Diaz writes, memorably, “but what remained most vividly in his mind was the feeling of sorrow and senselessness that came with each act: those worth defending were already dead, and each of his killings made his own struggle for self-preservation less justifiable.”
Not for the faint of heart, perhaps, but an ambitious and thoroughly realized work of revisionist historical fiction.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56689-488-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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