Well written but ill-conceived.
In poet/memoirist Spivack’s first novel (With Robert Lowell and His Circle, 2012, etc.), magic realism is used to explore the plight of post–World War II Jewish refugees in Manhattan.
At the New York Public Library, Herbert, a former Austrian official, finds a small bundle that contains the tiny, deformed body of his second cousin Anna. Called Rat for the white whiskers that frame her mouth, she has been mysteriously delivered from Leningrad. Rat is not the only person seeking Herbert’s help in the New World. The Tolstoi Quartet wants him to recover the four pinky fingers they had to surrender in order to leave Vienna with their lives. Somehow they know the pinkies are “waiting to be rejoined with their owners,” an only slightly implausible leap of faith for men who once shared beds with their animate instruments while their wives slept on the floor. Readers already know the fingers are in the possession of Dr. Felix, a Nazi posing as a pediatrician to New York’s refugee community. Even more bizarre than the idea that anyone would let Felix near their children, given the creepy way he behaves before ushering out the parents and molesting the kids, is the collection of body parts dispatched to him by the Nazis that he keeps in jars against the day when he can make them “live again.” Obviously none of this is meant to be realistic, and some point about survival and renewal seems to be intended. But it's lost in a text that has some truly vulgar scenes—Anna’s pre-Revolution interlude with Rasputin is soft-core pornographic—and an overall maddening vagueness. Images of Herbert’s son Michael appear over and over to make the point that his loss has fractured the family, but it’s never explained why delivering him to the death-camp boxcars would enable his equally Jewish father, mother, and brother to go free. A final scene of renewal in suburban America is, regrettably, unearned.
Well written but ill-conceived.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35396-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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