A relentlessly somber yet lyrical study of grief across decades.
A multigenerational saga about hard living in rural Iceland.
This hefty novel from the veteran Icelandic novelist opens with a case of lost memory: An amnesiac man wakes up in a churchyard and makes his way to the farmlands in the country’s more sparsely populated northern reaches. There he gathers stories about the residents’ often dour lives: infidelities, fatal car wrecks, early promise hitting the skids. Stefánsson’s novel encompasses a host of characters, but two of their stories occupy the bulk of it. In one, Guðríður, a 19th-century farmer’s wife, captures the imagination of a priest and journal editor with a philosophical essay about earthworms; the intellectual and romantic flirtation that ensues threatens to upend both of their lives. Another storyline turns on her great-great-grandson, Eiríkur, who’s half-successfully used his musical talent to manage a relationship with his father and find love, even if one longtime partner was married. Early on, the main drama involves Eiríkur’s arrest for shooting at a truck—a thin peg to hang a long novel on. And Stefánsson’s historical meanderings, including matters of faith, sex, and religion (Kierkegaard is repeatedly mentioned), can test a reader’s patience. Yet in evoking melancholy, Stefánsson (and translator Roughton) have ably elicited the feeling that “it can be so difficult to live that it’s visible from the moon.” And his descriptions of the northern Icelandic landscape are elegantly written and a perfect match for the vibe. “Your eyes shine so beautifully when you talk about your fjord…that the sadness disappears from them,” one of Eiríkur’s lovers tells him. “Keep going, don’t stop!” A series of song references, from Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen to various Scandinavian acts, supports the notion that the sadness has a kind of music to it; the novel is appended with “Death’s Playlist.”
A relentlessly somber yet lyrical study of grief across decades.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781771965811
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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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