The labors of love take on new meaning here, but despite the hypnotic quality of the prose, too many shadows fall across the...
Starting with a grisly murder scene, Myerson’s fourth novel (after Me and the Fat Man, 1999, etc.) probes murky waters in Victorian London, as a woman crippled and in love trades in her surgeon husband for a married laborer.
Laura Blundy does the dark deed, bludgeoning her carrot-topped spouse Ewan, first with a piece of sculpture, then with her crutch, and finally by poking a poker into his brain—all because he reacts negatively when she says she’s leaving him. There’s more to her reaction than meets the eye, of course: her middle-class childhood having ended when her father died and she was thrown into the streets, Laura embraced that urban underworld willingly. She bore a son after being raped, but gave him to an orphanage rather than keep him with her in the workhouse, only to be told a few years later that he’d died. Despondent, jailed on suspicion of having murdered another child, she saw her life going nowhere—and then a taxi carriage ran over her leg. Enter Ewan, the hospital surgeon who first tries to save her limb, then has to amputate it, all the while falling desperately in love with his paradox of a patient, the lovely woman who embodies good breeding and coarse carnality. Laura marries him, but theirs is a fitful passion, overseen by Ewan’s crone of a mother who lives with them. He wants children, Laura doesn’t. When Laura throws herself into the Thames to escape Ewan’s demands, she’s pulled out by Billy, a worker helping build the London sewer—and a new love is born. It’s a haunting union that neither can explain at first but both ardently desire; as its dreamlike nature unfolds, Laura must make room for Billy, then must persuade her lover to run away with her, leaving his own family behind.
The labors of love take on new meaning here, but despite the hypnotic quality of the prose, too many shadows fall across the heart of Laura Blundy, concealing more than they reveal.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57322-168-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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