Greengrass digs deep below the surface to explore the human condition and presents the reader with unearthed truths to...
This debut novel considers the intrinsic intimacy and distance between mother and daughter, from the perspective of a narrator who is both, as well as the struggle to clearly see one another and oneself.
A woman, pregnant with her second child, gazes out a window at her firstborn, a little girl, playing in the garden, and contemplates the deep sense of loss that accompanies her daughter's growth. “The weight of her body when I lift her takes me by surprise, its unfamiliarity a reiteration of the distance between us,” Greengrass’ narrator muses. “She used to clamber over me, her legs around my waist, her arms around my neck, as though I were furniture or an extension of herself, unthought-of or intimately known. Now she stands apart and I must reach for her, on each occasion a little further until it seems her progress towards adulthood is a kind of disappearing and that I know her less and less the more she becomes herself.” Juxtaposed against the woman’s meditation on motherhood is her loss of her own mother, some years before, when the narrator was 21 and “at that turning spot between adolescence and adulthood,” a death she continues to mourn and mull as the “defining event in [her] life,” fracturing it in two. She reflects, too, on her maternal grandmother, a psychoanalyst with whom she spent her childhood summers, absorbing her disciplined pursuit of self-knowledge. Interspersed between the narrator’s personal reflections are the stories of scientists who quite literally exposed mysteries that lay within human beings: the man who discovered the X-ray; the surgical team whose work, in the mid-18th century, shed new light on the anatomy of the pregnant female body; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and his daughter, Anna. Unflinchingly focused on life and death, love and loss, this book is not light reading. And while it has been labeled a novel, it is less a story—with a single dramatic arc and resolution—than it is a densely packed collection of clearly articulated insights on the struggle to bridge the gaps between ourselves and those to whom we yearn to be close, our efforts to define and take full measure of ourselves. It is novel as excavation.
Greengrass digs deep below the surface to explore the human condition and presents the reader with unearthed truths to ponder and pocket.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-57460-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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