Kertes’ voice is a lyrical one, and his work is frequently moving, but long passages seem to wash by without fully...
Two boys flee the 1956 Russian occupation of Budapest.
Robert and Attila (named for the Hun) Beck are brothers, ages 9.8 and 13.7, respectively, according to the ever precise Robert, who narrates this circuitous but fervent novel. Kertes (Gratitude, 2009), winner of the National Jewish Book Award, begins his newest work in his own native Budapest. It's 1956, and Russian soldiers have invaded the city to quash the Hungarian Revolution. With their family, the Beck brothers flee across the border, eventually landing in Paris. But their journey isn’t merely a geographical one. As they travel, Robert and Attila begin to uncover secrets about their Jewish family’s past. Those secrets revolve around a pair of mysterious figures: Raoul Wallenberg and Paul Beck. Here, Kertes is revisiting characters from his previous book, Gratitude, and perhaps for that reason, the material occasionally feels predigested. But Robert and Attila are a winning pair of guides. They are exposed to childbirth as well as to violence and death, experiences that are particularly dismaying for Robert, the wide-eyed younger brother. Meanwhile, Attila tries to make sense of things. Robert looks on as Attila grapples with skeins of tangled questions, which range in subject from the design of the human body to the meaning of God’s omniscience. He muses, “Did the Lord think up everything at once because he is omniscient? I guess I’m saying, how does that work—being omniscient, I mean? Did he start out, as a baby God, being somewhat omniscient? Did he start out as God of the Milky Way, only later to become God of the whole universe?” But when Attila and Robert ask their grandmother about the family’s wartime experiences, the boys are told: “News like that can wait.” There is, it seems, a limit to knowledge. Oddly, it is Attila’s flights of questions, and the final unveiling of those wartime secrets, that form the most vivid parts of this novel. On the other hand, the present day—1956, when Russian soldiers have beset Budapest—carries the watery tint of unreality.
Kertes’ voice is a lyrical one, and his work is frequently moving, but long passages seem to wash by without fully convincing the reader they’ve actually happened.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-30811-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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