In the bleak pages of history, Forsyth finds a story of enduring love and artistic integrity—her retelling is a fairy tale...
Forsyth (Bitter Greens, 2014, etc.) unearths a beautiful love story in the making of the Grimm brothers’ fairy-tale collection amid the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars.
Twelve-year-old Dortchen Wild lives next door to Wilhelm Grimm and his brothers in the German kingdom of Hessen-Cassel. The “wildest” of six sisters, Dortchen would rather be outside than waiting on her bedridden mother to avoid the wrath of her ill-tempered father. Forsyth captures the sweetness of domestic life in a time of political unrest as Dortchen sneaks out to see Wilhelm, often bringing him herbal remedies from her father’s shop. Sickly and desperately poor, Wilhelm and his brother Jakob are collecting stories in the hope of publishing a book—and Dortchen hopes to get closer to him as he transcribes her homespun versions of “Hänsel and Gretel” and “Cinderella.” Her fanciful stories contain a morsel of truth, the most unsettling of which is found in “All-Kinds-of-Fur,” about a princess who's forced to marry her own father after her mother dies. Dortchen can’t hide from her father’s incestuous rage as she matures beyond his control. Nor can she shake the ghostly presence of Napoleon’s army: “Dortchen and her sisters had seen the innumerable red eyes of the French army’s campfires from the window of their sitting room.” Later, Forsyth describes the aftermath of war in chilling detail as Dortchen’s brother, Rudolf, returns from Russia with frostbitten fingers and toes, infecting his wife and baby with the germs from his coat. Wilhelm and Dortchen are separated for many years, enduring heartache, sacrifice, and longing as Wilhelm and Jakob work through several failed drafts of their book and Dortchen cares for her family.
In the bleak pages of history, Forsyth finds a story of enduring love and artistic integrity—her retelling is a fairy tale in itself.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04754-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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