Readers with an interest in the private life of Sigmund Freud may find the book of interest.
A fictionalized account of Sigmund Freud’s romantic involvement with his sister-in-law.
Mack and Kaufman (A Version of the Truth, 2007, etc.) collaborate for a third time to produce a novel based loosely on unsubstantiated conjecture that Sigmund Freud and his wife’s sister, Minna Bernays, had a love affair while living under the same roof. After being fired from yet another job as a lady’s companion, intelligent and outspoken Minna is welcomed into the chaotic Freud household. Sigmund and Martha have six children, and Martha has a variety of physical complaints, so she welcomes her sister’s help. Minna becomes intrigued with her brother-in-law’s work, and they begin to spend hours in his study discussing his theories of human behavior, which, Freud claims, have deep sexual roots that must be brought to the conscious level. Their conversations and long walks provide the catalyst for a deeper attraction, and eventually, Freud and Minna’s relationship progresses from plain kinfolk to cheating kinfolk. Is Freud really a man whose wife doesn’t understand him? Does Martha know or care that her husband’s engaged in intimate acts with her own sister? Neither spouse appears overly concerned about the activities of the other. Martha spends much of her time in an opium-induced haze (she even spoons her wonderful elixir into the kids at the first sign of illness), while Sigmund prefers to heighten his sensations with a nose full of coca, a habit he introduces to Minna, who has her own way of dealing with the world: cigarettes and secreted bottles of gin. Freud shocks the scientific community with his Studies in Hysteria, and Minna’s racked with guilt and flees to another city. But she’s soon back with the Freud family to face more affair-related crises, wonder just how much her sister knows, and do a lot more soul-searching before they all pack up and move to England. Freud’s theories about human sexuality and behavior may be considered pretty wild, but his own sex life comes across as dull.
Readers with an interest in the private life of Sigmund Freud may find the book of interest.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16307-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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