Storms, war, explosions, sex, science, tragedy, and deep affection. Worth every minute.
The laying of the first transatlantic cable offers second-novelist Griesemer (No One Thinks of Greenland, 2001) the framework for a very 19th-century take on the birth pangs of modern times.
Successfully slathering on layers of Dickens and DeLillo, Griesemer goes for the big canvas in a fact-filled and consistently entertaining depiction of the messy, expensive, and dangerous labors needed to connect the new world and the old by means of telegraph wire. The cast includes investors, engineers, artistes, an illustrator, poseurs, visionaries, a whore, mesmerists, servants, the Lincolns, and sailors. The scene shifts between a London stewing in a sewage crisis and a young USA ready to erupt in civil rebellion. Chester Ludlow is the brilliant American engineer at the center of it all. Unfairly handsome, charismatic, and absolutely devoted to the success of the largely British project, he is the unhappy husband of former actress Franny, who pines for the three-year-old daughter Betty, who fell to her death in an epileptic fit. Bullied by a rich American investor into taking the lead in a magic lantern fundraising tour, Ludlow is thrown into harness with the show’s director, Joachim Lindt, and his beautiful wife Katerina. While the show is raising thousands of pounds and Katerina and Ludlow are raising each other’s temperatures in London, Franny is at home in Maine with Ludlow’s brother Otis trying to raise Betty’s spirit from beyond. The heated affair with Frau Lindt never distracts Ludlow from the Great Work, but problems do abound. A surgeon with electrical theories has seduced Atlantic Cable’s directors into unsound science, and there’s never as much money as there should be. On the edge of the action, artist Jack Trace takes in the events and turns them into newspaper gold with his quick and stunning sketches of everything from the ghastly launch of the Great Eastern, the ship that will prove indispensable, to the spectacular end of the doomsday weapon Ludlow forges for the Yankees.
Storms, war, explosions, sex, science, tragedy, and deep affection. Worth every minute.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30082-4
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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