Cameo appearances by Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Dumas and Delacroix, and lush, period-appropriate, at times impenetrable...
Scenes from the lives of French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz and Irish actress Harriet Smithson.
Morgan’s latest (Indiscretion, 2006, etc.) is an impressionistic patchwork employing every narrative device from stream of consciousness to interior monologue, complete with an opera libretto and faux-Shakespearean blank verse. The protagonists’s alternating stories could be separate novels, so scant is their interaction—Hector and Harriet will not meet until the final third of the book. Hector’s sections take him from childhood to life in Paris, where, to the dismay of his physician father and pious provincial mother, he abandons medical studies to pursue his fanciful musical dreams. Harriet progresses from ingénue in her father’s theater company to music-hall melodrama in London, then takes roles in Shakespearean plays. Unable to dislodge Covent Garden’s venerable leading ladies, she heads for Paris, where, performing as Ophelia at the Odéon, she’s an overnight sensation. Her triumph is marred only by that eccentric young composer who pesters her with pleading missives, all of which she rebuffs. Years later, back in Paris for an ill-starred comeback, Harriet hears Hector’s Symphonie Fantastique, inspired by her. The twain meet and the attraction is finally mutual. Hector’s family disowns him for marrying an actress. Nevertheless, all is bliss—there’s a child, Louis, and an impoverished but loving ménage in Montmartre. Abruptly, even for a novel as circuitous as this, Harriet turns to partaking liberally of the brandy hidden in her bureau. Her irrational frenzies and tantrums tax Hector and drive him to Germany, where he’s well received by more musically astute audiences. Harriet’s dire prophecies of Hector’s betrayal are fulfilled: Hector falls prey to the shrewd, refreshingly ungifted Marie. Harriet is sent to the country to dry out. After several strokes, she becomes an inarticulate and hence more accommodating basket case, and Hector nurses her in her decline.
Cameo appearances by Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Dumas and Delacroix, and lush, period-appropriate, at times impenetrable prose make for an unwieldy but credible behind-the-music exposé of the Romantic era.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36951-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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