Slow-paced in the first part, the novel nevertheless provides plenty of action scenes and enticing details.
From Sten (Mine, 2010) comes a historical novel concerning a boy named Arion and his adventures in the ancient world.
It is 439 B.C.E. when Arion, a Greek boy of 12, sets sail from Mytilene with his merchant father, Periandros. Heading south across the Aegean Sea, their vessel passes islands such as Chios and Samos, allowing father and son the opportunity to reflect on The Odyssey. Such is the case when the two pass ships off of Samos (“Arion remembers that Homer compares to a quadriga the fifty-two-oared Phaiakian galley that carried Odysseus homeward from Scheria Island”). Nothing, however, can compare to the excitement of Egypt (“Unlike any other land on earth, Egypt is a surprise, an intoxicating dichotomy, a verdant plain eight to sixteen kilometers wide and nine hundred seventy kilometers long, watered and nurtured by a river that is usually more than a kilometer wide, in the midst of one of earth’s most inhospitable regions—the driest, nearly hottest, desert”). After taking in many of the sites of this alluring land, the eager travelers find that fate becomes grossly less kind. During celebrations for Arion’s 13th birthday, a group of marauders attacks with deadly consequences. What will it mean for Arion’s future when his world is so suddenly, and brutally, shattered? Taking quite a few pages to get to that event, the book does not always deliver the most gripping prose. One example arrives in a description of how Arion and his father become tired when finishing their evening meal: “After an empty stomach is satisfied, and night falls, though sleep is resisted by an active mind and imagination, the body demands it, and the two deck lamps are too dim to resist the darkness.” Items of the ancient world are, however, explained in efficient fashion, including the symbolic importance of scarabs to the Egyptians: “So often in Egypt one can see myriad baby beetles emerge like magic from a ball of dung….It is life from nothing, life from muck!” These sentiments, combined with the violent second half of the story, create a complex image of the period that is vibrant with mythmaking but also seared by the constant possibility of terror.
Slow-paced in the first part, the novel nevertheless provides plenty of action scenes and enticing details.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5118-0154-6
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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