The protagonist lovingly describes Beethoven as “an honest soul, lined with deep fissures and clumsy mendings”—which is just...
This debut novel about a young man’s quest for his father gives glimpses of Beethoven in his prime as well as in his final months.
At age 11, George Thompson learns that he’s the illegitimate son of Beethoven, once his Bavarian-born mother Hannah Bekker’s piano teacher. In 1826, George, having lost his sweetheart and his job as a printer’s apprentice, leaves Virginia for Europe to find his real father. Posing as an English nobleman writing for the Williamsburg Post, he is conned into staying at a Vienna “whoretel” (brothel) and finally gains admittance to Herr Beethoven, who is just months from death. As George conducts a meandering interview through questions written in a notebook and steels himself to announce the true reason for his visit, he learns more about the deaf, irascible composer—everything from the four marriage proposals he made to his public contest with French pianist Daniel Steibelt and the triumphant premiere of his Ninth Symphony: the audience “rose as one, row after row, like a rhythmic wave. Hats and handkerchiefs waved in the air, hands clapped high above heads, all exploding with adoration for their deaf Lion of Vienna. With his eyes, Ludwig heard their joy.” Jones gracefully switches between George’s first-person account of the interview process and vivid third-person flashbacks to Beethoven’s earlier life. She is careful to show all sides of the maestro’s identity: his erratic behavior and penchant for making enemies but also his musical genius and perseverance in spite of his disability—just as George vows to Beethoven, “I’ll neither deify nor damn you.” The plot nimbly blends the historical record—with brief appearances from Beethoven’s sister-in-law Johanna and nephew Karl—and invented elements, like George’s relationship with the prostitute Gabrielle and the surprise consequences of his impersonation of a “Sir.” Although there’s been a misunderstanding about the nature of Hannah’s relationship with Beethoven, George nevertheless learns of the high regard in which the composer holds her—she inspired Leonore, the heroine of his only opera, Fidelio. The short Book 3, set in the United States after Beethoven’s death, feels mostly unnecessary, but it doesn’t detract from the overall quality of this charming picaresque.
The protagonist lovingly describes Beethoven as “an honest soul, lined with deep fissures and clumsy mendings”—which is just how he comes across in this deeply researched, accomplished work of historical fiction.Pub Date: May 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5352-0142-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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