Beautifully written and surprisingly fresh given the well-worn subject matter.
Another sensitive fictional portrait of a complicated marriage from the author of Tigers in Red Weather (2012).
This time Klaussmann has real-life models: Gerald and Sara Murphy, whose 1920s golden years on the French Riviera inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Her novel begins with Gerald’s loveless childhood in 1890s Manhattan; a harrowing chapter about the loss of his adored dog lays the groundwork for his bond with Sara, first seen as a bored post-debutante in pre–World War I London. Their early love is touchingly depicted as shared desire for a life “entirely of our own creation,” which is what they achieve at the eponymous Cap d’Antibes villa. Klaussmann makes good use of several fine biographies of the Murphys (cited in an author’s note) to capture the magic of a privileged, bohemian existence dedicated to the pleasures of fine food and drink, friendship, and self-expression through the elegant, idiosyncratic clothes they wear and their beautiful home furnishings. She also draws on nonfictional references to Gerald’s ambiguous sexuality to imagine a passionate affair with pilot Owen Chambers, an invented character. Down-to-earth Owen offers a reality check on the nonstop house parties with famous friends (Scott and Zelda, Ernest, Cole, and many more of the usual Lost Generation suspects): “The spectacle and the costumes…the endless conversations about ideas, and the misunderstandings. Could you live without that?” Owen asks. Probably not; Gerald remains devoted to Sara (who knows more than she will admit about him and Owen) and the world they’ve fashioned. Their son Patrick’s struggle with tuberculosis brings an end to the halcyon days at Villa America. A welter of letters chronicling the Murphys’ ordeal slightly blurs the novel’s focus in later chapters but also testifies to the profound, enduring affection they prompted in all who knew them. A closing vignette poignantly revisits the couple in the heyday of their campaign to make life as beautiful as their dreams.
Beautifully written and surprisingly fresh given the well-worn subject matter.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-21136-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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