In her fourth historical novel, Essex (Leonardo’s Swans, 2006, etc.) alternates the stories of two influential women, a Greek courtesan and a Scottish heiress, who each played a crucial role in the history of artifacts from Athens’s Golden Age.
In 1799, wealthy Mary Nisbet and her new husband, the dashing but penniless earl of Elgin, journey to Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire. Posted there as British ambassador, Elgin has an all-consuming ambition to secure the priceless marble sculptures adorning the Acropolis in Ottoman-ruled Athens before they are dismantled to make bricks or pulverized to extract lead for Turkish bullets. Strapped from keeping Napoleon at bay, the British government won’t finance Elgin’s ambassadorial or archeological endeavors, so the fiscal burden falls on Mary. A parallel tale set during the 30-year truce that preceded the Peloponnesian War follows Aspasia, the philosopher-courtesan beloved of Athens’s de facto dictator, Pericles, and an outspoken critic of the oppression of women in a city-state supposedly founded by the goddess Athena. Ponderous sections devoted to the logistics of creating and removing the marbles slow down what is otherwise a briskly entertaining narrative. Educated and spirited, Mary is an exemplary wife who endangers her delicate health with multiple pregnancies, underwrites Elgin’s profligate spending and charms the Turks into sanctioning his looting of the Parthenon and other Greek monuments. Aspasia reluctantly permits Pheidias, sculptor of the marbles, to model his colossus of Athena after her. No good deed goes unpunished, Mary and Aspasia learn, for women who forget their place. After Mary is finally estranged by Elgin’s selfishness and financial demands, English law allows him to trash her reputation in divorce court and take her children. Aspasia is publicly tried on trumped-up charges of blasphemy and licentiousness. Both triumph—though Mary pays a heavy price—thanks to their own grit as well as the help of powerful male defenders.
A lively exposé of double standards in two societies that prided themselves on democratic ideals and respect for women.Pub Date: June 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51971-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
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A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: LITERARY FICTION
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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