A lovely book about books—and freedom.
An understated, lyrical story of reading and resistance over the tumultuous generations.
“For centuries the sun has been rising over the terraces of Algiers, and for centuries, on those terraces, we have been killing each other.” So writes Adimi in the first of her novels to be translated into English, a story that unfolds over decades, beginning in 1936, when a young pied noir named Edmond Charlot (who was a real person) buys a tiny bookstore in Algiers. He calls it Les Vraies Richesses, meaning something like “the true wealth.” In time he starts a publishing house, discovering a young Albert Camus. World War II follows, and Charlot battles censorship and paper shortages; then comes the Algerian War, and though readers continue to come to his store, no one has any money: “When I can, I slip them something I love and say, ‘Take it: fix me up later,’ ” Charlot records in his journal. Adimi recounts Charlot’s inspiring passion for books and ideas through his own voice and those of others, including one of his converts, a now old man named Abdallah, who tends to the store long after the death of its founder. But the Algerian authorities have no use for such secular spaces; as a journalist notes, “The government is sacrificing culture to build mosques on every street corner!” A young man named Ryad, an engineering student, is sent to clean out and refurbish the space. “Destroying a bookstore, you call that work?” Abdallah, who wears a shroud around his shoulders so that “the day God calls me, they’ll be able to bury me straight away,” asks the dutiful young man. The books he is sent to trash eventually enrapture Ryad, of course. Populated by the ordinary citizens of Algiers and such figures from French literary history as Robert Aron and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Adimi’s gently spun story takes an ominous turn as it nears its end, when the secret police turn up with increasing frequency, their “mustaches, sunglasses, dark suits” the uniform of the enemies of literature.
A lovely book about books—and freedom.Pub Date: April 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2815-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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