Brilliant work, from one of the finest new novelists at work today.
A most unusual portrait of the artist gradually takes shape in this Anglo-Indian author’s limpid second novel (after The Opium Clerk, 2003).
The story’s set in 16th-century Hindustan, where the gifted youth Bizhad, son of Mughal emperor Akbar’s favorite court painter (“the Kwaja”), grows up among the emperor’s inner circle. Bizhad, the namesake of a legendary artist renowned for his illustrations of classic Middle- and Near Eastern tales, is raised in a hothouse atmosphere by his father and beautiful young stepmother Zuleikha, kept away from all corrupting influences (i.e., other people), and forbidden to learn to read or write. Instead, he’s forced to concentrate his energies on an artistic bent that manifests itself in vivid, lurid miniatures depicting “haunting dervishes, lovers, poems of death and unrequited dreams.” The most compelling of such dreams is Bizhad’s unrequited love for his emperor, which he fantasizes in explicit erotic scenes showing himself and Akbar as lovers. A jealous rival reveals Bizhad’s secret, and he’s banished, thereafter condemned to years of wandering, poverty, and unfulfillment. But the death of a beloved friend stimulates new emotional and artistic growth, and a kind of miracle occurs. Out of Bizhad’s love for one man emerges a heartfelt identification with all human life, indeed the entire visible creation: a renewed passion of a very different kind, manifested in Bizhad’s much celebrated portrait of a Madonna and child, flowering in a life-affirming denial of the warning posed in the novel’s epigraph (that “thou who draw pictures will be punished on the day of resurrection”). This moving parable of the manifold sources of art bears some resemblance to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. But it’s a richly satisfying original creation: a story that might have come out of a contemporary Arabian Nights.
Brilliant work, from one of the finest new novelists at work today.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-297-82926-2
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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