An admirable if stiff portrait of a noble heart.
The final volume of Grey’s Marie Antoinette trilogy (Becoming Marie Antoinette, 2011, etc.) grimly details the queen’s sad and, to contemporary eyes, terribly unjust end.
As a rabble invades the Palace of Versailles, Louis XVI still believes that his people wish him no harm. But his wife, Marie Antoinette, is more realistic: After years of being defamed by the French, ever since she was brought from Austria to marry Louis, she knows that the revolutionary mob’s threats to have her head are no mere rhetoric. From the sacking of Versailles to the royals’ removal to the Tuileries “for their own protection,” the dismantling of the French monarchy is minutely dissected. Unfortunately, the depiction of outcomes we already know can be less than dramatic if suspense and conflict cannot somehow be generated, and here, they are not. The royal family’s ill-fated escape attempt, engineered by Antoinette’s paramour Axel von Fersen, is vividly reconstructed, as is every permutation of the revolutionary process as various political factions dispute whether or not the royals should remain in place as constitutional rulers, be banished, or, finally, be tried and executed. Time and again, Antoinette pins her hopes on Axel and on some of the secret loyalists among her guards and jailers, but these hopes are repeatedly dashed as the Parisians prove that their barbaric rampaging trumps the machinations of even the canniest demagogue or courtier. It is excruciating to read about the humiliations Antoinette is forced to endure: the massacre of her faithful retainers, the execution of Louis, and separation from her daughter and her son, the dauphin, who, beaten and starved, is “reeducated” to vilify her. It is almost with relief that readers witness Antoinette’s own eventual march to the scaffold. Perhaps the tedium of this novel is partially due to the characterization of the queen herself. Despite all the indignities she suffers, she is never allowed to entertain or voice thoughts that are less than saintly and forgiving.
An admirable if stiff portrait of a noble heart.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-52390-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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