A leisurely paced novel from master stylist Skibell (The English Disease, 2003, etc.), who does a fine job of acquainting...
Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, an oculist, falls in love with two different women at two different periods in 20th-century history—and along the way prominent figures, most notably Sigmund Freud, get caught up in his relationships.
At first Sammelsohn has the misfortune to become smitten with Emma Eckstein, one of Freud’s most famous patients. While love is always a complicated affair, the complications become more extraordinary when the object of your affection is herself in love with Freud and displaces this relationship onto you. Sammelsohn finds that Emma is more than he can handle when she begins to channel Ita, Sammelsohn’s young wife, who had died by suicide on their wedding night, when her husband was only 12. When Emma is committed to a hospital for symptoms of hysteria, Sammelsohn consults Freud to try to figure out how to deal with her strong desire to consummate the relationship—and, ironically, Freud is technically brilliant in his diagnosis but flustered by the reality of this woman. The narrative then shifts to a lengthy discussion of Dr. Ludovik Leyzer Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto and motivated by the universal language movement to seek peace and harmony. One of his followers is Fräulein Loë Bernfeld, with whom Sammelsohn falls desperately in love. Unlike his relationship with Emma, this relationship is consummated (in a scene that manages to be simultaneously both comic and erotic) and eventually leads to their marriage (destined, alas, not to last). Finally, the narrative shifts to the Warsaw Ghetto in the late 1930s, where Sammelsohn becomes involved in a bizarre scheme with an outré rabbi, but he emerges triumphant, eventually heading to the promised land of Palestine, thanks to the ghostly and angelic visitations of the late Ita.
A leisurely paced novel from master stylist Skibell (The English Disease, 2003, etc.), who does a fine job of acquainting the reader with 20th-century European intellectual culture.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-929-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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