A melodramatic tale that lacks historical rigor.
A triptych of parallel stories that revolve around the horrors of World War II.
In 1943, Wilhelm Falk is a high-ranking member of the Nazi SS, and in the last 15 months, he’s been witness to unspeakable human suffering. He’s been secretly gathering information about Nazi extermination camps and transmitting it to a trusted friend in America, Pastor Theodore Graf. When the opportunity arises, Falk puts his officer’s uniform on a dead German soldier, purloins his papers, and allows himself to be captured by Allied troops, hopeful that he can somehow make it to the United States. However, he must hide the truth from his fellow POWs, who will surely harm him if they discover his plan. Meanwhile, after young Izaak Tauber’s Jewish father is arrested by Nazis in Amsterdam, his mother, Rachel, realizes that they’re both in danger too. With the help of a mysterious man known as “Fritz the Wanderer,” they plan to escape the Netherlands together—but then Fritz dies, and Izaak and Rachel are sent to a labor camp. In a third story, German Otto Müller moves to Pennsylvania in 1920 and starts a milling business. However, Americans are suspicious of anyone of German descent, and Otto is falsely accused of sedition. He’s arrested, along with his son, Herbert, and held on New York’s Ellis Island in an internment facility. Jay’s (Speaking in Tungs, 2018, etc.) account is impressively ambitious, offering a sprawling view of the wages of war from three distinct perspectives. She ingeniously braids them into a coherent narrative tapestry, and along the way, she realistically describes the human degradation experienced by prisoners in the Nazi camps. However, for those familiar with the genre, this is all well-trod ground, and the prose can be cloyingly overwrought: “He swallowed hard and blinked back tears as his mama rubbed his arm through his thin coat. The trash-filled area around the patio blurred, and he swiped at his eyes.” Also, Jay’s history is less than impeccable; for example, someone who’d once served serious prison time for criticizing Hitler, as Falk had done, would have been an unlikely candidate for the SS.
A melodramatic tale that lacks historical rigor.Pub Date: April 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-578-47707-7
Page Count: 413
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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