A story about art, prejudice, faith, and trauma engrosses but doesn’t fully convince.
A literary thriller about the improbable discovery of a manuscript lost at the end of World War II.
Susanna Kessler is mourning the death of her uncle when she discovers, in his home, an old manuscript that appears to be signed by Johann Sebastian Bach. Susanna’s uncle, an American soldier who fought in the second world war, found the document in an old mansion in Weimar and took it with him when he left. Now the manuscript is Susanna’s; enlisting the help of two scholars, Daniel Erhardt and Scott Schiffman, she begins a search to discover the manuscript’s origins and to confirm its authenticity. But this is no simple task. The manuscript consists of an anti-Jewish cantata written by J.S. Bach, a work brimful of hatred, prejudice, and violence. Susanna, Dan, and Scott can’t help wondering if they’d be better off destroying the cantata instead of introducing it to the world. Belfer (A Fierce Radiance, 2010, etc.) skillfully weaves this story together with a much older one: in 1783, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, eldest son of Johann Sebastian, gives the hateful cantata to his beloved music student Sara Itzig, who also happens to be Jewish. Belfer then traces Sara’s ownership of the cantata through the first half of the 19th century and through the various vicissitudes of Sara’s family history. Gradually, these two stories merge to reveal how the manuscript ended up in Susanna’s hands. It’s a remarkably suspenseful story, a literary thriller in the tradition of A.S. Byatt’s Possession. Unfortunately, Belfer doesn’t have Byatt’s subtlety or wit. Her characters are flat and two-dimensional despite the personal crises that more than a few of them endure. Dan, for example, can’t reconcile his religious faith with the death of his wife. “How could an all-powerful, all-loving God let Julie die?” he wonders. “He hoped that someday he would come to understand God’s mysterious ways.” Here and elsewhere, Belfer’s prose can be blunt and lifeless. Still, the force of her engrossing story wins out in the end.
A story about art, prejudice, faith, and trauma engrosses but doesn’t fully convince.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-242851-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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