Donoghue, a Briton, is readable and well-intentioned, but plausibility frays in the number of bad guys converted to goodness...
This first novel ambitiously and awkwardly examines questions of guilt and forgiveness arising from the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.
At a 1962 chess tournament in Amsterdam, Holocaust survivor Emil Clément is disturbed that his first opponent is the German Wilhelm Schweninger, a Nazi propagandist. His emotions and memories are jolted further when he is sought out in the Dutch city by Paul Meissner, an officer at Auschwitz who helped Clément and, after jail time for war crimes, became a priest. Chapters alternate between the strange bonds formed amid the horrors of imprisonment and the slowly growing friendship among the three men in 1962. To boost officers’ morale at Auschwitz, Meissner starts a chess club, but when he learns that the Jewish prisoner Clément is considered unbeatable, he arranges to have him face the camp’s best German players. After Clément defeats three, he is hounded by a Gestapo sadist who is also a top chess player. Schweninger has a minor role in the flashbacks: Germany’s best player in the 1940s, he was to have been the prisoner’s last opponent but was prevented from playing the game. In the 1962 chapters, Meissner is a Catholic bishop dying of leukemia who wants Clément to find forgiveness and to abandon his belief that there are no good Germans. The novel’s dubious setup, with Meissner so quickly corralling Clément and Schweninger, is offset by a fairly persuasive rendering of the camp, where the author uses the chess games to maintain an element of suspense in a situation in which death was almost inevitable—and clearly was postponed for Clément.
Donoghue, a Briton, is readable and well-intentioned, but plausibility frays in the number of bad guys converted to goodness and, unfortunately, in the notion that the bitterness Clément has harbored for almost two decades can be eased in several days of recollection and dying-man homilies. That’s quite a talking cure.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-13570-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
A daring concept not so daringly developed.
In Kidd’s (The Invention of Wings, 2014, etc.) feminist take on the New Testament, Jesus has a wife whose fondest longing is to write.
Ana is the daughter of Matthias, head scribe to Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. She demonstrates an exceptional aptitude for writing, and Matthias, for a time, indulges her with reed pens, papyri, and other 16 C.E. office supplies. Her mother disapproves, but her aunt, Yaltha, mentors Ana in the ways of the enlightened women of Alexandria, from whence Yaltha, suspected of murdering her brutal husband, was exiled years before. Yaltha was also forced to give up her daughter, Chaya, for adoption. As Ana reaches puberty, parental tolerance of her nonconformity wanes, outweighed by the imperative to marry her off. Her adopted brother, Judas—yes, that Judas—is soon disowned for his nonconformity—plotting against Antipas. On the very day Ana, age 14, meets her prospective betrothed, the repellent Nathanial, in the town market, she also encounters Jesus, a young tradesman, to whom she’s instantly drawn. Their connection deepens after she encounters Jesus in the cave where she is concealing her writings about oppressed women. When Nathanial dies after his betrothal to Ana but before their marriage, Ana is shunned for insufficiently mourning him—and after refusing to become Antipas’ concubine, she is about to be stoned until Jesus defuses the situation with that famous admonition. She marries Jesus and moves into his widowed mother’s humble compound in Nazareth, accompanied by Yaltha. There, poverty, not sexism, prohibits her from continuing her writing—office supplies are expensive. Kidd skirts the issue of miracles, portraying Jesus as a fully human and, for the period, accepting husband—after a stillbirth, he condones Ana’s practice of herbal birth control. A structural problem is posed when Jesus’ active ministry begins—what will Ana’s role be? Problem avoided when, notified by Judas that Antipas is seeking her arrest, she and Yaltha journey to Alexandria in search of Chaya. In addition to depriving her of the opportunity to write the first and only contemporaneous gospel, removing Ana from the main action destroys the novel’s momentum.
A daring concept not so daringly developed.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-42976-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight.
A daughter reveals the intertwined tales of her mother—a theatrical legend—and herself, a mature retrospective of sharing life with a towering but troubled figure.
Katherine O’Dell, star of stage and screen, blessed with beauty, red hair, and a gorgeous voice, “the most Irish actress in the world,” was not Irish at all. She was born in London, and the apostrophe in her name crept in by error via a review following one of her appearances on Broadway. However, the fact that Katherine is “a great fake” doesn’t cloud the love her daughter, Norah, has for her, a bond which exists alongside the unanswered question of Norah’s father’s identity, “the ghost in my blood.” The complexities of this mother/daughter relationship and its context in Ireland, the men it includes, and the turns both women’s lives take through the decades are the meat of this tender, possessive, searching new novel from Man Booker Prize–winning Irish novelist Enright (The Green Road, 2015, etc.). Saga-esque, it traces Katherine back to her parents, strolling players from another era who invited her on stage at age 10, scarcely imagining the luminous, internationally recognized figure this “useful girl” would become. But the novel is no fairy tale. Katherine’s life was marked with loneliness; disappointing, sometimes exploitative, and abusive men; the pressure of trying to remain successful; a desperate act of violence; and a breakdown. Norah narrates both her mother’s life and her own—she’s the author of five novels, a mother, a sexual being, and also the sole offspring of a parent she both adored and observed at a distance. Fame, sexuality, and the Irish influence suffuse the story, which ranges from glamour to tragedy, a portrait of “anguish, madness, and sorrow” haunted by a late, explanatory glimpse of horror which nevertheless concludes in a place of profound love and peace.
Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-324-00562-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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