A thoroughly intellectual postmodern fable, wise yet melancholy, meant to be read slowly and savored.
In Levi’s (A Guide to the Perplexed, 1992) long-awaited second novel, a failed Ph.D. candidate, expelled from Cambridge’s Trinity College, learns he’s king of Septimania, the land given to the Jews of eighth-century France by Charlemagne.
It’s 1978. Malory, an accomplished organist and tuner, is approached by pale and fragile young Louiza, a mathematical genius, while he works on the organ in St. George’s Church. As they talk, Louiza spins mathematical formulas that convince her the pair share a destiny. They make love. Unknowingly impregnated, Louiza is promptly coerced and locked away by American Cold Warriors to tackle the math that will destroy communism. Malory, not realizing he’ll be a father, searches for her. Then Malory’s grandmother dies, bequeathing him a worn antique notebook. It’s a diary written by a friend of Isaac Newton during a year in Newton’s life lost to history. On the last page, in Newton’s hand, is written, "I have found the One True Rule...that guides the Universe." Levi’s narrative is linear, shifting from England to Rome to post–9/11 America, with flashbacks to Newton’s era, Charlemagne’s conquests, and Scheherazade’s tales. As Malory seeks Louiza and, through a strange series of events, becomes king of Septimania, the narrative moves to Rome, where Malory takes residence in Septimania’s plush villa enclosing its sanctum sanctorum, an overflowing antiquarian library. The reclusive Louiza and naif Malory earn sympathy, while supporting players like Antonella, a beautiful Italian girl at Cambridge, and La Principessa and Tibor, refugees from Communist Romania, fill Levi’s narrative with esoteric meditations, allusions, and metaphors on quantum behavior, the Grand Unified Theory, Bach, music, love and loss, the nature of numerology, and Schrödinger’s cat, all laced with philosophy and wit—"The digital alarm blinked out the minutes of the early hours with a spastic colon."
A thoroughly intellectual postmodern fable, wise yet melancholy, meant to be read slowly and savored.Pub Date: April 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1248-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
