A really fine, deeply intelligent book with so much to think about and so much unexpected hope.
A stodgy, miserable, retired engineering professor in an Australian senior village finds that his world, seemingly in the last stages of crumbling into nothingness, is completely reinvented.
Winner of the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award, a prestigious Australian prize, Wilson's (Cusp, 2005) quiet, gorgeously put-together novel opens by introducing professor Frederick Lothian, a rather unlikable man spending what seems to be the last scene of his final act in a detestable "villa" into which he has stuffed the detritus of his life. A partial inventory: a tubular Breuer chair, a Braun turntable, Saarinen tulip chairs and matching oval table, a million memories of bridges, airport terminals, skyscrapers, and blueprints, the remains of a lifelong obsession with form and function. (Images of many of these things are reproduced in the text.) Also crowding the scene are unwashed dishes, abandoned meals, and more painful memories than it seems possible to bear, all founded on a childhood tragedy which remains buried until the end of the book. Having had a beautiful, kind, infinitely tolerant wife, Martha, and two fine children, Lothian has lost them all, Martha to death, his grown daughter and son in other ways. He has done everything possible to avoid meeting his neighbors, but whether he likes it or not, the green-eyed woman next door with the dozens of annoying pet birds is coming into his life. Jan is a fantastic character, and it will take all the wit, insight, patience, and, ultimately, exasperation she can muster to pry this old nut from his shell. The metaphorical layering with regard to extinctions—the ends of things—is beautifully accomplished, and a wide variety of other interesting matters—the treatment of women in engineering school and patriarchal families, of Aboriginals in Australian society, of old people in retirement villages—engages as well. The various sad backstory details about old deaths, betrayals, and other wounds are teased out slowly and patiently, but that momentum is no greater than the more uplifting one: the unforeseen, truly magical opening of possibilities for growth, change, reconciliation, happiness.
A really fine, deeply intelligent book with so much to think about and so much unexpected hope.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947793-08-8
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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