Unequal to Scott’s best work (The Manikin, 1996, etc.), but her voice remains one of contemporary fiction’s most eloquent...
Scott continues to swim against the literary mainstream with her seventh novel, set on the island of Elba and in the mind and memory of an elderly Italian-American woman.
In 1944, she was ten-year-old Adriana Nardi, the sheltered daughter of a wealthy family whose comfortable estate (“La Chiatta”) was a safe haven during climactic battles between Nazi and Fascist troops and the Allied armies pledged to liberate Elba (a storied place known as Napoleon’s place of exile). In the present day, she is Newark matron Mrs. Robert Rundel, who on the day after her 70th birthday, suffers a pulmonary embolism while aboard a train approaching New York’s Penn Station—as she indulges emotional reminiscences of that long-ago “liberation.” Scott juxtaposes expertly the thoughts of impulsive young Adriana and those of the Senegalese soldier she finds, hurt and hiding: Senegalese teenager Amdu Diop, who had become separated from his regiment, and who is—at Adriana’s urging—given shelter at La Chiatta. It’s a rich premise, but the story’s action lags for too long behind redundant (albeit vivid and credible) declarations of Adriana’s adoring fascination with the dark exotic stranger, and Amdu’s charmingly naïve envisionings of himself as a potential humanitarian and savior (perhaps even a saint), whose ineptness as a fighting man threaten his exile from the virtual Eden that is liberated Elba. The narrative is enriched by Scott’s renderings of the thoughts of intelligent Nardi matriarch Giulia and of her inanely self-centered brother Mario (whose actions precipitate tragic misunderstandings). But similar use of Mrs. Rundel’s fellow train passengers amount to no more than pointless distractions. Amdu and Adriana are nevertheless powerfully appealing figures, and they alone (and together) make this ungainly novel well worth reading.
Unequal to Scott’s best work (The Manikin, 1996, etc.), but her voice remains one of contemporary fiction’s most eloquent and essential.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-316-01053-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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