A book that stuns, almost literally, with its force and its humility. A tender book. A savage book. A once-in-a-lifetime...
With a scope no smaller than human existence and no greater than the life span of a flea, Davis’ (Duplex, 2013, etc.) eighth novel navigates the territory of history, faith, family, and mortality on the backs of a caravan of cosmic siblings.
The Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook are the archetypical siblings of this haunting novel, which opens in a yoga class held in the heart of a labyrinth deep below an icy settlement at the literal end of the world. Led by the enigmatic Jee Moon, the group is meditating in corpse pose at the end of a strenuous practice. When one of them fails to arise, the remaining characters are thrust on a journey of memory through which they carry their shared childhood “like a wagon or a bindle or a hump.” It is from this slender thread that all resemblance to traditional narrative is woven. In keeping with Davis’ earlier novels—which explore interstices, numinous metamorphosis, and the stretching, twisting, crumpling, bending space between being and nonbeing—her latest effort takes place in a realm of almost pure language. The siblings’ childhoods together on Fairmount Avenue with their great and terrible Mother, their unknowable Father, and their untrustworthy Nanny occur in simultaneity with their adult lives, their separate journeys to the settlement (a symbol of the Tibetan bardo), and their future journeys toward enlightenment. The reader gathers a sense of their characteristics—the Botanist is humorless and idly flirtatious, the Iceman is bluff and lovable. However, these characteristics are meant less as markers to delineate individual characters than they are facets of the single, complex temperament of a family, or a generation, or an entire species. So, too, is the reader encouraged to relax their expectation of the book as a chronology and instead approach Davis’ singular object as a limbo of the now in which all gestures carry equal weight, all characters are interchangeable, all perspectives are “we.” The challenges of this kind of approach are formidable, but the tenacity of Davis’ language, her spellbinding images and spellbound objects, the fragile beauty of the worlds she creates in the moment of their destruction reward an open-minded reader’s labors.
A book that stuns, almost literally, with its force and its humility. A tender book. A savage book. A once-in-a-lifetime story.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-55597-829-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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 tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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