A small gem for admirers of Mishima, Oe, and other midcentury modernists.
Final work by Tanizaki (Red Roofs & Other Stories, 2016, etc.), one of the greatest 20th-century Japanese novelists.
Chikura Raikichi isn’t a voyeur, not exactly. A celebrated writer, he’s more of an anthropologist behind his own doors, and now, observing the ways of his maids and the night-crawling young men of the district, he’s in a nostalgic mood, as a doyenne in Alabama might have been in the 1960s. “We no longer call the household help ‘maids,’ "he sighs, “and we can’t simply address them by their given names, as we did in the old days.” As the narrator notes, Raikichi does not approve of such innovations as calling a maid “Sister,” since it’s a term used for the sake waitresses at the beef shops of old, too. Tanizaki, who died in 1965, focuses closely on all the changes that came over Japan after the war, when country girls stopped hiring on in service to fine households, harder work in all than finding a job in a factory or secretarial pool—and certainly stopped hiring on for life. “Today’s girls stay for six months or a year,” the narrator laments, “thinking it good training for married life, then they hear from home about a marriage prospect, and they’re gone.” In between moments of ponderous reflection, Raikichi delights in the simple ways of some of his servants, such as one who spoke in amusing dialect (“the jabbering of southern barbarians”) and another who, witnessing dogs copulating, was thrown by the subject until having it explained to her, whereupon “whenever she heard that two dogs were going at it, she would go to watch.” There’s a faintly musty exoticism to the whole enterprise, but Tanizaki, as always, is a keen student of human ways and admirable for his attention to detail; the slender book is reminiscent of the best of Turgenev, if without the Russian writer’s arch humor.
A small gem for admirers of Mishima, Oe, and other midcentury modernists.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2492-5
Page Count: 190
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
