A splendid realization of its rich subject, and Tuck’s best so far.
The notorious Irish courtesan who also inspired Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch presides regally over Tuck’s impressively researched, lushly written latest.
The episodic tale picks up (the historical) “Ella” Lynch’s story in 1854 in Paris, where she attracts the attention of Paraguayan prince regent Francisco Solano Lopez (“Franco”), who appropriates the statuesque beauty, and brings her home, to “transform Paraguay into a country exactly like France.” Tuck (stories: Limbo, and the Other Places I Have Lived, 2002; etc.) skillfully distributes dozens of narrative vignettes among these two impetuously matched lovers, their servants and miscellaneous acquaintances and correspondents, and numerous foreigners (“engineers, architects, physicians, all eager to make their fortunes in this rich new world”). Franco succeeds his tyrannical father Carlos as dictator, and spends his country’s resources lavishly, acquiring nearly as many mistresses as possessions, while Ella, continually pregnant, bears him five surviving sons. Tuck contrives numerous episodes that suggest the cruelty and violence underlying this emergent nation’s veneer of sophisticated self-indulgence—and particularly Franco’s ebullient masculine charm. And when diplomatic relations with neighboring republics are brusquely severed, Paraguay is drawn into a long, enervating war against a Triple Alliance comprising Brazil, Argentina, and “Banda Oriental” (later Uruguay). The story’s latter half is a swiftly paced chronicle of military defeats by vastly more numerous opposition forces, starvation, capture, torture, and execution. Prominent among the figures swept up by Franco’s self-destructive momentum are his cupiditous and treacherous siblings, an English stonemason hired to build his presidential palace, a scholarly “apothecary general”—and Ella’s beloved gray mare Mathilde. It all ends smashingly, with several views of Ella and her remaining sons, escaped to London and thence Paris, but not from the nightmarish history that has changed them forever.
A splendid realization of its rich subject, and Tuck’s best so far.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-620944-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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