A moody, muted composition about art under the thumb of tyranny.
A fictional treatment of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his long history of humiliation and persecution under Soviet rule.
“Muddle instead of music,” read the headline in Pravda after the 1936 performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Under Stalin’s rule, this signified more than just a bad review—it was a loudly broadcasted command to stick to the Communist Party line and, amid purges and gulags, tantamount to a death threat. This brief novel from the Man Booker Prize–winning Barnes (The Sense of an Ending, 2011, etc.) captures the cloud of fear the composer lived under until his death, regardless of whether he was in or out of favor with “Power” with a capital P. He delivered speeches he didn’t write that made claims he didn’t agree with, and he acceded to demands he allow a tutor to school him in Soviet doctrine, while laboring to compose music that wouldn’t offend but still indulged his creative spirit. All of this took a toll on him, of course, and Barnes captures his subject’s stress and dark humor with his signature grace. There's plenty of sharp imagery depicting Shostakovich’s bind: “He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce” captures the putrescence of acclaim that's a function of politics; elsewhere, he conceives of life as “the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step.” But this portrait also feels too restrained at times. While Barnes willingly gets into Shostakovich’s head when it comes to his painful submission, he generally elides how he composed music under those circumstances. That softens the sense of artistic loss in a story that might have sent a stronger signal about what happens to creativity in repressive circumstances.
A moody, muted composition about art under the thumb of tyranny.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94724-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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