The themes are timely and engaging, and Moscow-born Gessen displays an affecting sympathy for the smaller players on...
A man returns to Moscow to care for his grandmother and learns much about Putin’s Russia, its new prosperity and old problems.
Gessen (All the Sad Young Literary Men, 2008) opens his second novel where his first ended, in 2008. The new work’s central figure, Andrei Kaplan, recalls the feckless, at times unlikable young men of Gessen’s debut. After eight years of grad school and a Ph.D. in Russian literature and “modernity,” Andrei, at 33, is struggling to live in New York on a meager salary from online teaching. So when his older brother calls to say he must leave Moscow—his business schemes have brought legal woes—and asks Andrei to come care for their grandmother, it seems like a promising alternative that might even bolster his resume. Grandma Seva is 89 and physically healthy but suffering “medium-stage dementia.” As Andrei settles in to a daily routine, he comes to know her past and the new Moscow, a place he left at age 6 with his parents and brother. He’s accepted by a group of socialists who show him the pricey city’s cheaper side while they discuss Putin’s form of capitalism, the “dictatorship of the market.” They stage political demonstrations and share a strange sort of nostalgia for Soviet times. Small crises arise, but nothing like the chilling developments of the last 30 pages. Gessen’s prose is generally unembellished and lends itself to deadpan humor, though it can be repetitious. The plain style does suit the muted action of Andrei’s mostly mundane existence, and understatement helps to highlight the real hardship and peril that other lives confront.
The themes are timely and engaging, and Moscow-born Gessen displays an affecting sympathy for the smaller players on history’s stage.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2131-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
