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
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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