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
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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